Mass Effect: Control Lost
by ZalzabarJones
Summary: Two years after the destruction of the Reapers, the galaxy is still slowly rebuilding itself. People have lost everything; entire worlds, entire species rendered extinct. But what happened to the indoctrinated forces, those not fully turned into Reaper troops? A new cast of characters has to deal with the loss of control left by the war, and what exactly the indoctrinated are up to
1. The Storm

The sand storm came from nothingness.

Before the sand there was nothing. Now it obscured everything. The brown grains of sand blotted out the sun. There was only the sand.

The woman pressed forward, blindly, through the storm.

She knew nothing but the blinding, and stinging sand.

Once, she had a name. But the sand had taken it from her.

All she had was her skin, but the sand even threatened to erode that from her bones.

The wind swept away footprints as they were left behind. The woman has no idea which direction she was headed, the only thing she knew for sure was that she had to keep pushing forward.

Her entire body was being rubbed raw by the grains of sand. That was when the whispers started.

It was the same whispers she had heard for the last several months.

The whispers of dead comrades and fallen generals whispered in her mind, through the sands. They grew louder with each aimless step.

Finally after what felt like an age, a word parted the sands and calmed the storm, "Submit."

The storm died, and the woman found herself in a featureless desert. She had no choice but to press onwards. But it was only a few steps before she found herself at the precipice of a cliff. Below her stretch and entire sea of people. Fellow wanderers who had found each other in the desert and congregated in the valley below her.

"Come." Another word in that same deep, resonate tone. That pierced the desert and the woman's very being. It also shocked her awake.

Her bed was small and uncomfortable. Like it always was. But this time the displeasure had doubled with the added sand that followed her from the desert.

The woman sighed, and pulled herself up out of bed. The sand burn from the storm was still present, on top of her already numerous scars and more than a few tattoos.

The tiny metal room was cold and rusty, a far cry from the hot, dry desert. She wiped the sand from her bed where it joined the small collections from the previous nights. She sighed and stood up.

Perhaps a shower will relieve her feelings of dryness and irritability these nights caused.

But even amongst the warm, filtered water the words echoed inside her bones. Amidst the steam she was nervous that she would listen.

She diligently cleaned the sand out of her new wounds, and cleaned around the almost two hundred separate scars. On days when the dreams were particularly bad she would try to remember herself by counting each individual scar. It varied, but the average number was in the mid 180's.

After a long while she finally exited the shower after drying herself off and wrapping the towel around her. Her right arm still felt stiff, despite the relaxing hot water. Her stringy, dirty blonde hair gripped to her head while still damp.

"Took you long enough," the commando on the other side of the bathroom door said.

"I didn't know you were waiting. And there is another bathroom."

"That our distinguished pilots are using. Thanks, but no," the grey skinned turian walked into the bathroom.

The women noticed each other's raw skin, rubbed bloody by the sand.

"You too?" the avian alien asked.

The human nodded.

"What do you think?"

"The shower helped clean the sand out," she said before walking away to find fresh clothes.

Back in her room the woman contemplated both the recent events and the fact that someone else was experiencing what she did. It was an intriguing coincidence, but one that would cause the woman to disembark the ship at the next stop and find other transport.

It would be a hassle, but it would be safer than traveling with someone else… someone like her.

Their breed was inherently untrustworthy, and as deadly as they as are unstable.

It would be better for everyone if she changed ships.

And if the crew found out… they would probably execute both of them on principle.

It wasn't easy being on the wrong side of a galaxy spanning war. But it wasn't like she made the choice willingly. Or at least she wouldn't have made it if she knew exactly what she was getting into.

But that didn't matter to most people. All they cared about was she had fought for the bad guys, she had fought with the Reapers instead of against them.

No one would care that she didn't fight with them by choice or even willingly. Every second a small part of her brain had rebelled, but the voice that had called to her before was too strong then.

Now she felt like she could ignore the voice for now. But she couldn't tell for how long she could resist.

Once she changed into fresh, clean, sand free clothes, the woman went to the small mess hall in attempt to get some food to calm her frayed nerves and possibly drink away her past.

The food was standard cargo ship crap, but she did find a bottle of human whiskey. Part of her wondered what her pilots would say to her taking their expensive alcohol. Probably nothing good.

Before she could make a decision regarding the whiskey it was pulled out her hand by small singularity field controlled by the grey woman. She had changed but she hadn't dried off, beads of water clung to her mandibles.

"What have we here? Whiskey? Never heard of it. What is it?" she asked.

"Human alcohol," the other woman answered.

"Well, I'm not dead yet," the turian said.

The woman was about to open the bottle when the ship rocked violently, flinging both women to the ground.

Alarms blared and bulk heads sealed.

The women picked themselves up off the floor.

"What the shit was that?" asked the turian.

The human said nothing. She used a table to steady herself. She reached underneath the table and pulled out the pistol she had taped under the table when she boarded.

Instead of responding the human ran over to the console on the wall. She started typing away at it, linking it to her omni-tool.

"What happened?" asked the turian again.

"The bridge is gone," the human responded.

"What do you mean gone?"

"Like it was ripped off."

"Shit. So we are dead."

"I don't think so, we haven't been directly attacked yet. If they wanted to we would have been blasted into space already. But we're not."

"That terrifies me."

The human just nodded.

"Would you happen to have another gun like that for me?" the turian asked. "Or maybe a nice shotgun?"

The human shook her head.

"Of course not."

One of the bulk heads started to be pried apart. The sparks erupting the other side told them that someone was cutting their way in.

"What kind of combat skills do you have?" the human asked.

"I've got biotics, vanguard training," the turian told her.

"Shit."

"What about you?"

"Tech and sniping. Sabotage and stealth."

"Well shit."

"Just get down if I tell you that I'm shooting someone."

"What do you expect me to do? I've only got my biotics! I've got no weapons and no armor!" the turian complained.

"Fine, I'll handle this. Just stay out of the way."

The door finally opened and the words "Sisters! Calm!" greeted them.

"We've come to take you home! We've come to take you to the Controller. You'll be home amongst your fellow indoctrinated brethren!" the voice said. It belonged to a masked man who entered the dining hall.

"Fuck that," the turian said.

The truian charged at the man from across the room. Her talons ripped out his throat and she grabbed his weapon from his hip and let him fall.

"What the shit is this about?" the turian asked.

"I don't know, but I think they want to bring us to that desert. Look at his armor. It looks like it is covered in sand," the human pointed out.

"Fuck. I am not going back there."

"Then are you ready to kill anyone on that ship?"

It was the turian's turn to not say anything. She just popped in a new heat sink.

Two guards saw the pair kill their spokesman and started firing at the women. The pair returned fire, and their enemies fell quickly.

"You got a name?" the turian asked.

The human went quiet while she peaked around the door to make sure the coast was clear before she moved into the attacking ship.

"Clara," she muttered.

"Kurana," the turian said. "Shall we kill some indoctrinated assholes?"

Clara, for that was what she decided her name was, couldn't think of a response to that sentence.

"They're resisting!" yelled a pirate. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first person entered through the door way at the far end of the cargo hold. Apparently they thought this raid was going to go a lot smoother than it did. The armored man was carrying a shotgun.

Kurana smiled, as much as a turian could, and yelled, "Mine!"

She biotically charged at the enemy, but to Clara it looked… different than a normal charge. There was less blue biotic fire than normal. But the turian grabbed the shotgun from the surprised clutches of the trooper and shot him with it.

Clara was more careful than her vanguard counterpart. She threw out a tech-mine that disabled the enemy's weapons before carefully picking off the soldiers.

Each time a raider died, each time their life slipped away Clara felt it. She felt them die. And not in the usual way when she took a life. This was like she felt the light snuffed out. The feeling was there, but it was dull and muted, almost not real. It was like a part of her died, a numb part, but she felt it all the same.

The raiding party was small. Only six people. And now they were all dead. The ship was theirs.

"I need to dethatch the ship, it isn't space worthy and the last thing we want is to be brought down by that wreckage," Clara explained as she tried to get her commercial grade omni-tool to hack the systems and dethatch the boarding bridge.

"Good idea," Kurana said. "I'll head to the bridge and see if there is anything I can do from there."

The turian ran off, but not before systematically checking each room to make sure they were empty of hostiles.

Clara heard the bridge starting to groan. The raiders had done this job sloppily. The ships were moving at different speeds. The ship Clara was on had started to peel off to the right slowly, but steadily. If she didn't retract the bridge the new ship would have a massive hole ripped in its side and Clara would be flung into space.

She managed to get the bridge to decouple as one bolt ripped itself free. The ships were separated. Clara secured the bridged and headed towards the cockpit with her pistol raised. She didn't trust her sudden turian partner.

Kurana was in the pilot's chair frustratingly pounding away at the console.

"They locked the controls, I can't do anything," she said angrily.

"I could try, but with this piece of shit it could take months," Clara muttered, motioning with her omni-tool.

"Yeah, I didn't bring any of my military stuff. My cabal gear would have been useful, but I just wanted to leave it all behind."

The turian turned around to look at the human.

They stared at each other for a long moment. Each looking at the other's eyes. The faint blue outlines, the marks of the Reaper indoctrination. The tell tale sign that they were the enemies of the living at one point. Two years later and they still hadn't faded for either. The brightness might have lessened, but the eerie glow was still there.

"You too?" the Kurana asked.

Clara nodded.

"I was stuck behind enemy lines on Palaven, wounded, and unable to fight. I shouldn't have surrender, but I did. I thought the Reapers would kill me, but they didn't. They turned me instead. I was a thrall for almost a year. You?"

Clara honestly considered not telling her. She rubbed her right shoulder with her left hand. She couldn't think of a scenario that would allow her to not tell her new comrade, but telling her didn't sound any better.

Eventually she sighed and pulled aside the collar of her shirt so that the tattoo above her heart could be clearly seen.

The broken diamond of Cerberus. The pro-humanity black operations splinter group that had been so far indoctrinated they sided with the Reapers the moment they entered the galaxy.

The turian's mood instantly soured. Her mandibles twitched uncomfortably. They both knew the other had been indoctrinated, turned, at some point. But now Kurana feared that she had to share a lonely and quiet ship with a xenophobic killer. Cerberus had no honor. The indoctrinated Cerberus agents had even less.

She kept a hand on her shotgun.

"Looks like we are heading for Omega. The landing coordinates are already punched in," Clara remarked.

"Yeah, I expect our dead friends' partners will be waiting for them."

"We'll have another fight," Clara said.

"I think our best option is to fight anyone at the landing pad and then part ways," Kurana said.

"A good plan," Clara remarked.

The blue glow of four indoctrinated eyes were the only lights in the cockpit as the tiny ship approached the space station Omega in silence.


	2. Omega

**Omega**

The ride was surprisingly short. It took less than an hour to reach Omega. The ship passed the dormant Omega-4 Relay, now silent and still, no longer bathing the system in its creepy orange-red light.

Ever since Shepard ended the war two years ago all of the relays suffered some damage, a few more than others, but the Omega-4 Relay was the only one to just… shut off. Since it connected the galaxy to the Collector Home World, supposedly destroyed by Shepard, no one was keen on turning it back on.

So the massive relic of the Reapers sat quietly in the system.

The ship auto-piloted itself to a quiet little back entrance on Omega. Which in and of itself was surprising. Since the war ended Omega had been teeming with refugees.

For every person that returned to their home world, or colonies, to rebuild from the devastation there was one who just couldn't take the constant reminder of the destruction that had reigned. So most of them went to Omega. It was hardly touched by the Reapers since most of the city had been taken over by Cerberus. And now that Aria was back in charge of things, Omega was the biggest city still intact, and it was offering all the vices you could ever want. Anything to escape the realities of the war.

Omega was now the home of the lost.

And if it was a dangerous place before, now it was even worse.

Clara pondered these things as the ship began its automated descent. Kurana fiddled with her shotgun.

Together they walked to the cargo bay door on the small ship. Each woman took a different side to the door and put their backs against the wall.

It was only then that Clara noticed the turian had none of the facial marks that had become so ubiquitous in the hierarchy. But now wasn't the time to ask about it.

The cargo bay door slid open and silence greeted them.

Neither female wanted to be the first to look out the door.

"Brothers?" called a voice.

It had to be another one of the indoctrinated forces.

"I'm gonna try something," Kurana whispered to Clara. "They're dead. We just want to leave here!"

Her shout to the indoctrinated ones outside was met with silence.

"There's got to be almost thirteen out there," Clara whispered back.

"How can you tell?" Kurana asked since neither had looked outside yet.

"Can't you feel them?" she asked.

It was like they were magnets, attracted to each other. She could feel the turian right there next to each other. And she could feel the others outside the ship. Their pull to her was weaker, but still there.

"Yeah…" the turian sighed. "Shit. What's the game plan?"

"Can you charge at any of them from here?" Clara asked.

"Possibly, but that would lead me open to all sorts of fire."

"If you can distract them for a second I can pick off at least two. And then would you be able to charge back to cover?"

"I can try," Kurana said in her husky voice. She concentrated on the closest target. One that she couldn't see, but could feel.

An instant before the turian charged into combat Clara heard gun fire.

She thought that the indoctrinated forces outside had started shooting. So the second the turian vanished she popped out of cover and shot two indoctrinated in the head.

Clara had looked outside for maybe three seconds, but she saw the turian firing her shotgun at enemies and the ones in the back of the force turned around, shooting at something else.

The human looked back out and took down two more indoctrinated as the turian charged back into the ship in a haze of green biotic fire.

The female turian was breathing heavily. Her mandibles moving with each breath.

"They're wearing Cerberus gear," she said with a suspicious glance at her human companion.

Clara didn't feel the need to respond to such accusations.

"There's someone else attacking them," Clara pointed out as she felt the last of the indoctrinated enemies die.

"Is that good for us, or bad for us?"

"It was good for us, now it is bad for us," Clara said. She couldn't feel any other indoctrinated besides the turian. She quickly glanced out of the ship and only caught a glimpse of a group of well armed, well equipped people heading towards the ship. It looked liked there was only three of them, but the glance was so quick that she couldn't be sure.

A split second after she brought her head back in the ship and shotgun blast hit the side of the ship.

"Shit!" the turian cried. Who stuck her gun out the door and fired blindly.

When Kurana had to reload is when everything went wrong.

Clara's mind was racing trying to figure out what to do against these new unknown enemies, when a batarian seemingly appeared in the doorway.

He fired a submission net around Clara, immobilizing her. Then he started attacking Kurana. He expertly kept her shotgun out of the way. The batarian's close quarters fighting was impeccable. His control of the weapon kept Kurana from getting a shot off, and his constant attacks kept her from charging. He kept the turian under pressure while his gauntlet reloaded another submission net. When the small chirp alerted him that it was ready he fired.

The net encircled the turian and she fell to the ground. Before she could even think about charging out the Batarian knocked her out cold.

He scowled, which made his wrinkly face even uglier. "Take these two," he ordered his guards. "The Shadow Broker will want to see this."

And then he knocked out Clara.


	3. Galactic Powers Part 1

**Galactic Powers Part 1; A Very Good Information Broker**

When the pair awoke they were tied down to their respective chairs. Which also appeared to be bolted to the ground. Every time Kurana attempted to charge, the restraints shocked her and broke her concentration. The room was clean, but boring. Full of tech for a communication device at the end, but not much else.

"Ah ah ah," the batarian said. "Sit quietly and listen. If you don't, I'll just kill you both now."

He punched a few keys on his omni-tool and a holographic image appeared. The image, though shrouded in darkness, was a large form. Massive really. But the image was also blurry and glitch prone. The communication networks were taking longer than expected to get back up and running.

The massive figure spoke, "These are the indoctrinated?"

The Shadow Broker's voice was disguised, scrambled with a device to hide their identity. The only thing that Clara could think was that the figure had to be at least twice the size of a krogan.

"Yeah," the Batarian told his employer. "We found them aboard the riding ship we were tracking. But they killed off the indoctrinated forces that brought them here and tried to kill the ground team. That was when I brought them here."

"Who are you?" the Broker asked the restrained females.

Clara didn't say anything. Mostly she didn't know how to respond to the Broker. She knew that the information dealer always worked through intermediaries. Never met with anyone in person, ever. It felt like she was being interrogated. And she suspected that Kurana felt much the same way as she remained silent as well.

"Fine, I'll find out who you are sooner or later," the Broker's modified voice informed them. "Baht, send me all of their biometrics. The works."

"You won't get much off their retinal scans," the Batarian informed his boss. "The indoctrination started to change their irises."

"Interesting. Send it anyways."

"Yes sir," Baht responded.

"I'll return in two hours with data. I expect something in return," the Shadow Broker said before abruptly disconnecting the call.

"What does the Broker want with us?" Kurana asked the second the call disconnected.

"He's an information broker, what do you think he wants?" the batarian responded coldly. "For example, he wants to know why you indoctrinated fuckers are suddenly banding together."

"We don't know," Kurana responded. "We were picked up by that raider ship, and when we figured out they were indoctrinated we killed them. Then you kidnapped us!"

"I think you know more than you are telling me," the batarian said. "How did you know they were indoctrinated? Where were they going to take you? How did they know you were going to be on that ship? Why did you kill some of your own?"

Clara didn't know if Baht was talking about them fighting the indoctrinated raiders, or their own people when they were turned.

"Why should we talk to you? You're just going to kill us anyway," Clara said.

"Because I used to know a drell," Baht told them. "He worked for the Broker a couple of years ago. Then the Broker found out that Feron was selling secrets to Cerberus. He disappeared. Word has it that the Broker tortured Feron for two years."

"So?"

"Before he even asked any questions. That was just for fun. Then the questioning started and no one has seen or heard from Feron since. No records exist of his. He just… disappeared. The Broker always gets what he wants."

Suddenly the Broker's image reappeared.

"Baht, I would like to speak to the human. Alone," the Broker's tone was not conversational, nor did it leave any room for questions. "Before you leave, take the restraints off."

"But-"

"Now."

The batarian did as he was told and untied Clara from the chair. She stood up to face the Broker. Once the room was emptied the Broker spoke.

"I understand that you are going by Clara now. Not your real name, but it doesn't matter to me what you decide to call yourself. I know everything about you."

"So?" Clara asked. "Is this supposed to intimidate me?"

"Yes and no. It is supposed to give you a very clear idea of who it is you are dealing with."

Clara was uneasy. She had picked the name out of thin air only a few hours ago. This was a very good information broker to have picked up on that.

"You were born Olivia Murray out in the colony of… interesting. Eden Prime. It's seen better days. Before Saren and the Geth, before Cerberus returned, before the Reapers."

"I wouldn't know."

"Yes, you haven't been back since you enlisted. Alliance military, reached the rank of commander. Medal for your actions at the Battle of Torfan. Earned yourself a ruthless reputation as the Butcher. Then you were honorably discharged after the battle of the Citadel with Sovereign. You earned a Silver Cross and a Purple Heart. Discharged from active service because you lost your right arm below the shoulder when the emergency bulkhead sealed your escape pod. You were reaching for a fellow marine, trying to bring him to safety. I'm sorry."

Even through the voice scrambler, Clara felt like she detect a hint of genuine remorse. _What kind of Shadow Broker is this? Maybe this isn't the real Broker… Just smoke and mirrors to hide another operative._

"Less than six months later Cerberus approached you, offered you combat service against the Reaper forces in exchange for your loyalty and the chance to rebuild you. I have to admit the tech that they put into your arm is impressive. Really they were just using you as a prototype. Then this is where things get fuzzy. Either you volunteer or were forced into some of the early stage Cerberus Reaper upgrades. Indoctrination followed. And yet somehow you managed to survive the war. And even more interesting you seem to be resisting whatever call seems to be drawing all the other Indoctrinated together."

"OK, you know everything about me. What do you want?"

"I... ah… shit…" the Broker said before the feed suddenly cut.

Clara stood in the silent, empty room. She looked around looking for something to do.

The Shadow Broker returned a few moments later.

"What was that?" Clara asked the mysterious figure.

"The war was not easy for anyone. Old… wounds acting up," the Broker said. It was clear, even through the shady video and voice scrambler that the Broker was lying. But about what, was beyond Clara.

"So what do you want from me?"

"Yes. You seem able to resist the siren's song the other indoctrinated are submitting to. I want you to find out what they are gathering to do. I want to know what they plan. If they are planning on war I want to know, and I want them wiped off the face of this galaxy."

"Why not send Baht?"

"Baht is an excellent soldier, but he can't find the other indoctrinated like I know you can," the Broker said before pausing for a long, deep breath. "There is a new cult on Omega that has begun abducting people. We think that it is the indoctrinated forced but we can't find them. The war has ravaged my systems. I don't have the operatives to send on a mission like this. I would like you to take it."

"What do I get out of it?"

"Think of this as your way of repaying the galaxy for the wrong you've done. Running from it isn't going to help you any. And this is going to give you the one thing you haven't had since the Alliance."

"What is that?"

"Control. Structure. You will get your orders, your mission, and you follow it however you see fit. I'll reward you and you get a purpose, a reason to keep living. You get to exert some control over your life," the Broker responded. Another deep, steadying breath from the mysterious figure.

Clara hated this situation. It reeked more of Cerberus than of the Alliance. But some part of her liked the sound of what the Broker was offering.

"How do you know that I won't accept your offer and then go join my indoctrinated brethren?"

"Baht will kill you if he suspects anything of that nature."

"Am I given the option, or am I being volunteered?"

The Broker chuckled. "You have the option, only one leads to certain death, the other does not."

"Fine, I accept your offer," Clara said.

"Good. Send in your Turian friend."

Clara exited the room and found Baht with his boot on Kurana's neck and a gun pointed to her head. "The Broker wants to see you."

Baht reluctantly holstered his pistol and let the turian up. She glared at the batarian and walked into the room Clara had just vacated.

"I guess we're partners now," Clara remarked.

"Shit," the batarian said. "I should have known when he ordered you unshackled."

After a few quiet minutes between the human and the batarian, Kurana exited the room and told Baht that the Broker wanted to talk to them all.

They all entered into the room.

"These two are going to investigate the cult on Omega for me. They are temporary operatives. Baht, you are their handler. If they do anything that makes you suspect that they are working with the indoctrinated forces you have kill permission. Standard info rewards apply," the Broker informed them.

"How do you want us to deal with hostiles?" Baht asked.

"Kill them if necessary. If you leave any for questioning then have at it. Just find out what this cult is doing, and why. Give these two better weapons."

"Can we get better armor?" Kurana asked.

"No. We'll talk after the… ah… after the… missions over," the Broker said. It sounded like the Broker was in pain.

Another voice appeared on the other end on the line. It too was scrambled, but it still sounded different enough to be another person. "I don't care what you are doing. You're getting out of here, L-"

The transmission ended suddenly.

"What the hell was that?" Kurana asked what Clara was thinking.

Baht scowled, it seemed like it was how his face just contorted normally. "They say the Broker was on Earth at the end. Fighting against the Reapers in London. You find me anyone who got out of that in one piece."

Clara nodded.

"Now you want new guns, fine, but if you two even think of anything fishy I'll blow your fucking heads off," Baht said as he punched a few keys on his omni-tool and the wall opened up to reveal a small armory.

Clara kept her pistol but grabbed a low grade Mantis sniper rifle off the wall and Kurana picked up a better shotgun.

"Let's get this over with," Baht said as he followed Clara and Kurana out the door.

Even thought Clara disliked the situation, she felt like she was being thrown into the fire for another mysterious organization that she couldn't trust, but damn it if the Broker wasn't right. She did feel better already having a purpose other than finding transport to another world.

"Where are we going?" Baht asked the two women whose glowing blue eyes darted around the dark orange back alleys of Omega.

"With us," said a voice behind them.

The three turned around to see a whole squad of humans with rifles at the ready.

Each of their hands went to a gun.

"Aria wants to talk to you. She wants to know what the Shadow Broker is doing on her station," the lead human said.

"What do we do?" Kurana asked.

"We play along for now," Baht replied. "Aria is bound to have something to tell us."


	4. Galactic Powers Part 2

_Author's Note: So we have met our resident quest giver and silent shadow partner, the rest of the squad will be set up in a bit. Right now I'm on vacation with lacking internets so I'll update when I can. Thanks for reading peeps._

**Galactic Powers Part 2, Omega Queen**

The armed guard escorted the trio to the headquarters of the self-proclaimed leader of Omega: the club Afterlife.

The thumping bass greeted them as they moved through the bar and dance floor up to the office of Aria. A sound proofed room that overlooked her refurbished club. The asari looked over the Shadow Broker agents as the door closed behind them and the sounds of the club were silenced.

"What is the Shadow Broker doing on my station?" she asked angrily.

To Clara the threat sounded almost halfhearted. The queen looked tired, beyond tired really. Exhausted, but the kind of exhaustion that isn't fixed with sleep. It was the exhaustion that was left after the war.

Baht laughed, "The Shadow Broker isn't on Omega. You should know that."

"What are his agents doing here then?" she asked.

"We're looking into this cult that has infected _your_ station," Kurana said.

Aria's eyes narrowed. "What do you know about it?"

"The great Aria is slipping," Baht laughed bitterly. "You used to know everything about Omega. And now you are telling me you know nothing about this?"

"I've got refugees crawling up my ass from all over. We are running out of places to put people, and every single one of them is looking for an escape. And to top it off I've been unable to kill enough of these Archangel fanboys to send an adequate message to stop all this vigilante nonsense. So you might imagine how my plate is fucking full," Aria snapped.

"But you know the Broker is here," Clara mused.

"Your transmissions aren't as secure as you would believe," Aria seethed.

"Look, you let us do what we are here to do, and that is one less problem for you to deal with," Clara said.

Aria turned her focus to the human. "Nice eyes. Why shouldn't I kill you indoctrinated fuckers right now?"

Suddenly a human burst into the room, "Um… Aria ma'am? I have a message for you."

"It better be fucking important or I'll throw you out the nearest airlock myself," Aria said through gritted teeth.

"It's from the Commander Shepard," he said nervously.

"Shepard? Great," Aria resigned. "Give it."

The human nervously handed Aria the message and ran out of the office. Aria looked over the message twice and threw it down.

"Fucking Shepard. Save the galaxy and suddenly she thinks she can run things," Aria ranted. "Fine. Get out of here. If you happen to see any Archangels out there, it is a one grand bounty for their heads."

"I thought the going rate was two grand," Baht replied.

"Consider the cost of doing business on Omega," Aria said. "Now go before I decide that I don't owe Shepard any more favors."

Clara was busy wondering how the Reaper Killer knew Aria and had the power to pull favors from the Omega Queen.

The trio pushed their way through the mob in the club. Without Aria's armed guards they had no one to clear the path for them. When they got outside the club they found a relatively empty corner, which was difficult because the streets were almost fuller than the club.

"Now where are we going?" Baht asked. His hand resting on his shotgun.

Kurana was about to say something but stopped herself. She turned around and started scanning the crowd.

Clara was already doing that. She found what she was looking for. She pointed out a human male with a pretty young asari. "Him."

"What?" Baht asked.

"He's one of the indoctrinated, I say we follow him," Clara asked.

"In this crowd?" Baht asked. "How do expect us to do that?"

"Just follow us," Clara said as she entered the teaming crowd and followed the indoctrinated person she could feel ahead of her.

They followed the man for almost an hour through the massive crowds. Passed beggars of all sorts, passed pick pockets, and at least three statues to the heroine of the galaxy surrounded by reverent silence.

Finally the man stopped and he tried to force the asari into a skycar.

Kurana stopped him by charging at him and placing a talon on his hand.

"Go," she told the asari who took off into the crowd.

She ripped the man's shirt open and found the Cerberus tattoo in the same spot as Clara's.

"Put him down Kurana," Clara told her. "Sorry about my friend," she explained to the indoctrinated man. "She just gets a little excited. We are looking for our fellows."

The man looked at the women's eyes and saw the indoctrination marks.

"I was going to take my prey up to the meeting spot. It is in the asteroid itself, hard to find unless you know where you're going," he responded. "What about the batarian?"

Clara suddenly responded with the only thing she could think of, "He's my boyfriend. He wants to join us."

"That right?" the human asked Baht who only nodded in response.

"Well the more the merrier, right?" the human smiled. No one smiled in response. "Fine, whatever, let's go. I'll take you guys to the Master."

Kurana's hands went for her shotgun, but Clara shook her head.

The look said it all.

"Wait."


	5. Reapers and Cults of Destruction

_Author's Note: This was originally my treatment of what I would have done for Mass Effect 4, but then i merged into this and it will probably be considerably shorter. But this is what I've got. I hope you peeps enjoy it._

**Reapers and Cults of Destruction**

It took almost two hours for the silent skycar to navigate the crowded airways of Omega. Without an official government there was no one to monitor or control the air-traffic. Flying was a suicide mission. But thousands of people did it anyways. Dozens of crashes happened everyday and no one bats an eye.

"Gah!" Baht exclaimed after the third almost crash. "I can't wait for Aria's air traffic plans to take effect."

"I thought Aria didn't care about Omega," Clara said.

"Right, just like she didn't care about Omega when there was the plague she quarantined," Baht said. "Trusted sources say that she has been talking about taking complete control of Omega, and going to form an actual government."

"Ha," laughed the driver. "There won't be much Omega to run when we are done."

Thankfully the landed shortly afterwards. Deep within the heart of the asteroid.

"Here we are!" he proclaimed loudly. "Beyond those doors is the indoctrinated HQ! Your new home!"

The second he turned around Kurana snapped his neck.

"So much for leaving some alive for questioning," Clara said. She had felt the life get snuffed out. She tried telling herself that the world didn't just get dimmer for his passing, she was just imagining it… right?

The trio drew their weapons. Before they walked through the door Baht brought up his omni-tool and made a call.

"Come in for info sweep and general clean up," he said to the Broker agents on the other end of the line. "It will take two hours to get here give or take, so get your equipment and leave now."

When he was done he nodded to Clara who pushed the doors opened. The synced omni-tools before Clara climbed a nearby ladder to reach the high ground and a sniper's perch. She only met one indoctrinated guard on the catwalk. An omni-blade to the throat silenced him forever.

When she got into position she readied her sniper rifle.

"I'm in position," she whispered to the others.

"Sh, I'm listening to this guy's speech," Baht said. "We don't move until I saw so."

The last bit was said for Kurana who was eager to go in guns blazing.

The area was a large cleared out section of the asteroid. Hunks of old mining equipment lay in heaps all over. The middle of the area was a raised section. From there she could see a person in dusty, sandblasted Cerberus armor standing there.

"I can't hear," Clara whispered. "Someone patch me in."

A few seconds later she heard the speech the man was giving through her omni-tool.

"Soon we shall return to our home! We shall go back to where we came from!" The assembled indoctrinated cheered. "We shall finish what was started! We shall finish we was begun with our blood! The first batch of subjects has already been sent! And soon we shall be joined by new brothers and sisters! Then we shall take Omega!"

The crowd cheered and Clara realized where she knew the voice from.

It was her old Cerberus commander.

"Go time," Baht said suddenly.

Clara shook her head to clear it of the thoughts of her old job, the job that saved her and cursed her.

A grenade exploded in the middle of the gathered indoctrinated. Kurana was already charging and shotgun blasting hapless foes.

Clara took sights and shot her old commander in the heart. Steadily, one by one, she dropped the indoctrinated raiders. And one by one the lights seemed to go out in the room. She tells herself that she is just imagining it. It is the tunnel vision that comes with combat. That she isn't _really_ connected with these crazy people. No. Not her. Not anymore.

Even she knows that she doesn't believe it.

Baht had been making short work of the enemies, with his grenades, nets, and heavy machine gun.

Kurana fought like a being possessed. Charging and using her shotgun with little care for her own safety. More than a few times she got in the way of Clara's sniping. More than a few times Clara almost opened the back of Kurana's head.

After several tense minutes of fighting, all the indoctrinated forces lay dead. All thirty of them. Except for the leader.

Kurana put her shotgun to his head.

"Wait," Baht said. "We need him alive. We need to know what he has got planned."

Clara had practically jumped off the ladder and sprinted towards the group.

"I know this guy," she said out of breath. "Let me talk to him."

She pulled off the dragoon's helmet and before her lay the blue, cracked, visage of the indoctrinated Cerberus forces. She worried that she looked like that. She had been avoiding mirrors since the end of the war.

But behind the blue glow of the indoctrination she saw the same face. The face of the man who trained her.

"Killian? Killian? It's me," she said. She desperately hoped he'd recognize her. She wanted that more than she wanted to say her old name out loud. "It's… It's…"

Her name turned to sand in her mouth. She couldn't force it out, not that she tried terribly hard.

The solid electric blue eyes looked up at her. "There is no longer any Killian."

The blood drained from Clara's face. "There is only the Controller… the Master."

Suddenly his hands were at Clara's head. His grip was like iron. His fingers felt like they were breaking into her skull and into her mind. She only heard one word, one word spoken in that deep, metallic voice of the ancient machines: "Submit."

It wasn't a statement or a question. It was a demand.

Clara didn't notice she was screaming. She flailed for her pistol. She drew it and fired wildly at the dragoon.

At least some of her shots must have connected as the next thing she knew she was flung across the room by the dragoon's biotics.

After she hit the ground and got up she saw the biotic, red lashes around Baht's throat and his free hand at Kurana's head. No doubt he was doing to her what he tried to do to Clara.

Clara drew her sniper rifle and tried to get it steady. But her hands were shaking too much, and her heart was pounding in her ears.

Baht meanwhile tried to get a submission net around the dragoon, but the indoctrinated Cerberus agent saw it coming. He released Baht from the lash and used it to cut through the net.

That was when Clara fired. Her round found a new home in the dragoon's brain. But that didn't seem to slow him down.

But what did stop him was Baht's two shotgun blasts tearing the dragoon's arm off and freeing Kurana. The dragoon fell to the ground and the batarian put a live grenade in the dragoon's head wound and walked away.

The grenade detonated and destroyed the remains of the man named Killian.

"You ok?" Clara asked her turian counterpart.

"My head feels like someone stuck in a drive core," the turian mumbled.

Clara didn't say anything, but she felt the same way.

"What the shit was he doing to you?" Baht asked.

"He was inside my head… somehow. I honestly don't know what he was doing. Maybe he was just trying to kill me," Clara said.

She lied. It felt like he was trying to overpower her nervous system. To submit it to his will. He felt like he was trying to force himself inside her mind and take control.

The batarian silently accepted Clara's answer.

They had a moment of silent recovery before it was interrupted by a loud warning.

"Stop there evil indoctrinated servants of the Reapers! I am here to stop your transgressions against the galaxy!"

"What the hell," Baht complained.


	6. Valkyrie

_Author's Note: Sorry for my inability to come up with compelling names. But this is the last new character I'll introduce for a while. So yay, I guess?_

**Valkyrie**

The two who were capable enough, turned to face the body the voice belonged to.

"In the name of justice you evil indoctrinated shall die this day! For I am Archangel" yelled an asari from the entrance they came from earlier.

"You've gotta be kidding me," Baht said.

The asari was wearing white and blood red battle armor and as she drew a rather impressive looking assault rifle, she activated some tech armor.

"It keeps getting worse," he mumbled.

Unlike the usual tech armor, the asari's was a solid white.

The batarian fired a few shots at the asari, but the bullets were deflected by the asari's reinforced shields.

Clara's angry ally charged at the asari as they traded weapons fire. The infiltrator meanwhile queued up a tech mine to try and disable the asari's shields.

When Baht got close the asari did something biotically and the batarian immediately started moving slower. This allowed the asari to take him apart with her free hand and both legs. In only a few seconds the once dominate hand-to-hand fighter had been taken out by the asari sentinel.

Clara threw her tech mine at the asari and when it made contact the resulting tech explosion was a brilliant flash of white, that did make the asari look like an angel with angry white wings of righteous vengeance.

The asari let loose a biotic field that tossed Clara off her feet. While she tried to get back to her feet the asari tried to get her tech armor back up.

Clara loaded her sniper rifle with a concussive round and fired. The round hit the asari square in the chest, knocking the wind out her. She doubled over in pain and breathlessness.

"We aren't the bad guys here," she said. "We already killed all of the indoctrinated forces here."

"Oh," the asari managed to say once she got her breath back.

It didn't stop Clara from loading a fresh heat sink and targeting the asari's blue head.

"I got lost in the tunnels and more time must have passed than I thought," the asari attempted to stand up, but Baht had come up behind her and kicked her legs out from under her.

"Ok! Ok! Ok! I'm sorry!" the asari cried as Baht put his shotgun to her temple. "I really should have checked the area first, but those two have the indoctrinated eyes!"

"Baht, you can let her go," Clara said. Baht took two steps back, but kept his finger on the trigger.

"What are you even doing here?" she asked the asari.

"I'm an Archangel, we devote ourselves to punishing the wicked of Omega. There is no police force here, so it has to be us to investigate and stop the bad guys. These are… were… the bad guys. So I figured I'd stop them," the asari said.

Clara looked her over. She looked young. For an asari that is. Her skin was a solid, deep blue. She had white facial markings around her eyes, and she clearly knew how to handle herself.

"Name's Alleis T'Sessi," the asari told Clara.

"Clara," the human responded curtly.

"What are you guys doing here?"

"Same thing as you are, but for different reasons."

"But you're…"

"Indoctrinated, yeah."

"So you aren't with your brethren?" the asari asked with her head tilted slightly to one side as she studied the human before her.

"No. We are trying to prevent them from doing whatever it is they are doing. The last thing I want is to join them," Clara said.

"Interesting. Everything I've seen of these guys they fight like a hive mind. Like they are one being. But why not you?" the asari asked.

"I don't intend to find out," Clara said.

The asari turned to look at the battlefield. "There had to be at least thirty indoctrinated here, you are impressive fighters." She studied the scorch marks and the bullets holes and the dead bodies. "See how they fight in groups, immediately taking the places of the fallen, breaking formations only to reform immediately? It is impressive."

"Right," Clara muttered. She went to check the rest of the room for information. Something to do while Kurana recovered and time to kill before the Shadow Broker's information team arrives.

In the back of the room, packed into crates, she finds a large mass of people. The individuals kidnapped by the indoctrinated forces.

Clara hurriedly started undoing the poor starving people's restraints. Most of them looked like they haven't had any food in weeks.

Suddenly a figure was beside her working on unlocking the shackles. The asari, Alleis, was right there next to her working on the steel locks that chained the collection of humans and asari and salarians in the large metal crate.

"I've got this," the asari said as she unlocked the one chain she had in her hands. "I suspect there are others in the other crate. Take care of them."

Clara didn't question it, she just ran off to open the other container and free the other kidnapped people.

Baht was looking over the freed people.

"We are going to need more transportation," he said into his omni-tool.

The next couple of hours consisted of Baht, Clara, and Alleis taking care of the kidnapped. Kurana had passed out on the ground in the center of the room.

When the information team arrived, Baht went to give orders which left Clara and Alleis time to speak.

"What did you say you were doing here?" the asari asked the human.

"I'm here to stop this, whatever it is, from happening ever again. And find a way to stop myself from being drawn here," Clara admitted.

"Would like some more help?" the asari asked. "I realize that we didn't get off on the right foot, but perhaps I could be of assistance to you."

"Why would you want to help me? I'm indoctrinated."

The asari cleared her throat. "I've been studying on becoming a Justicar. And they always help the helpless, the ones who can't help themselves. And what is more helpless than an indoctrinated woman fighting against herself?"

The asari smiled at what she assumed was a funny joke. Clara cracked the barest hint of a smile.

"But this…" Alleis motioned to the sad lot of people who were abducted. "This is unforgiveable. Someone needs to stop it, and if it is going to be you then you are going to need help. I doubt three people are going to be able to do it. And it is my solemn duty."

"I'm not really in charge of staffing decisions," Clara said. "The batarian is our HR department."

"H… R?" she asked.

"Human… never mind. He's in charge of our little gang. Sort of. It is complicated, and I'm not entirely sure how much I'm able to give away."

"I will talk to him," the asari said as she started to walk towards Baht. "Thank you."

"If it was up to me, I'd bring you along," Clara said before biting her lip in an attempt to prevent herself from saying anything else.

Alleis smiled at her and walked off.


	7. Interrogations During Downtime

**Interrogations During Downtime**

The information collection was going to take a long time, so the four warriors left the inner asteroid and returned to the bustling streets of Omega.

Baht got a short message from the Shadow Broker when he asked for a mission update.

It simply said, "Wait for equipment and further instructions."

Baht took them to the small area that the Broker owned and told them not to go too far. Kurana was conscious, but not for long. She fell asleep on the only chair. Her dreams were intense, even for a turian as she twitched and moaned in her sleep.

"Is your friend ok?" Alleis asked quietly.

"She isn't really a friend. And I think she got hit hard by the cult leader, or whatever the hell he was."

Baht had disappeared to go do something or other.

"I'll assume that this means I am a part of the team then?" Alleis asked. "Is the whole sleep over thing part of the initiation?"

"I have no idea. I was interrogated so…"

"Well if it is an interrogation you want, I've got just the thing," Alleis said as she bound up. "I'll be right back."

Clara tried to stop her, but the asari was too quick.

Alleis was gone for quite some time; Clara had gotten bored waiting for the upbeat asari or the batarian with mission info, so she had taken to trying to fix her sniper rifle. It shot ever so slightly to the left and it required manually readjusting the sights.

When she finally managed to get the sights to fit the way she wanted to, or at least as good as she could get without firing it, Alleis stuck her head in the door and motioned for Clara to join her outside.

The balcony outside the small apartment was just big enough for the two of them to stand and look out over the teeming masses of Omega. The air was hot, and smelled faintly of machine oil. But that was how Omega always was.

From three stories up the din of the crowd was a delightful low murmuring, so that they didn't have to shout to be heard.

"Where did you go?" Clara asked.

"I went to the small storage locker I have near here," the asari said as she produced a bottle and a pair of dirty glasses. "It is where I keep all of my belongings. I found this bottle of human vod… vodka?"

"Yeah," Clara said. "I'm surprised you could find any of this stuff. The demand has skyrocketed since the war but there is hardly anyone producing it."

"Well alcohol is only as good as the person you share it with, right?"

"I guess. So what is this about?" the human asked.

"Well you said you were recruited after an interrogation, so I figured you could interrogate me, and I brought the vodka," the asari smiled.

"You are a strange one," Clara said while the first round of vodka was poured.

"So I've been told." Alleis took a sip of the vodka and stuck out her tongue. "That's… harsh."

"You'll get used to it," Clara assured her as she took a sip of her own. "So, where are you from?"

"Terapso. We were an independent colony. Lots of helium-3 mining. Kind of a neutral ground for the Terminus. It was a harsh place to grow up, and then the Reapers bombarded us and leveled everything. Almost everyone died. The few of us who survived, did so in the underground network, but without ships or food or water everyone started dying off. Three of us made it off the planet. After that I joined up with the N7 commando squads and fought where I could. The squads trained me, taught me everything I know."

The asari finished the harsh vodka in her glass as the human said, "That's harsh, I'm sorry."

"Yeah… Where are you from?"

Clara took another sip of the alcohol. "Eden Prime."

"Sorry."

The pair commiserated in silence about their lost worlds and families. Clara's glowing blue eyes pierced the gloom and the red glow of Omega. They watched the masses below attempting to forget what they've seen or, like Clara, what they've done.

"I hope this isn't bad to say, but how old are you?" Clara asked.

Alleis smiled, "Its fine. I'm turning a hundred in a month."

"Shit. That's impressive," Clara said while the asari poured more vodka for them both.

"I was technically still a teenager when the Reapers attacked."

"This kind of shit makes you grow up too fast."

"It does. How old are you?"

"Barely over thirty," Clara said between sips of vodka. "I feel like I'm sixty."

They drank in silence for a bit. The asari started to feel the alcohol's effects. Her cheeks felt tingly and her hands felt a bit numb. Her human drinking buddy was doing reasonably better, but it had been a couple years since she had a drink. She knew that the drunk was going to sucker punch her sooner or later.

"Why do you want to be a Justicar?" Clara asked.

"With all of the death and the destruction and the… shit that the galaxy has seen, don't you think we should add something good to it? What better good can I do than being a Justicar?"

"Well from what I know about them, and it is only because of that one Justicar who served with Shepard, is that they are very… exacting. For them it is their way or the barrel of a gun. And while I'm not saying that you shouldn't kill anyone, just do you think you should add unnecessarily to the already astronomical body count?"

"I hadn't thought about that," Alleis mumbled. "Honestly, there are a lot of rules to memorize. It is going to take me years to memorize them all. I just kind of want to get out there and help people."

"Then do that," Clara said. She was starting to feel the alcohol in behind her eyes now. Omega had started to sway ever so slightly. "Besides, you're young, for an asari. Don't you have to give up all of the spice of life? The alcohol for one, sex for another."

Alleis smiled. "I never would have thought you would be the one to give a speech about enjoying life."

"Hey, if I can save one person from becoming a hallowed out husk of a person, then I did something worthwhile. A husk, that's what I should have been. Just a mindless servant, no thoughts, no questions, no regrets, no life. Just a twisted abomination of what once was human. Only fit to be killed by the Reaper Killer herself."

Clara finished her drink and poured herself another. She had forgotten what it was like to be drunk. She had long forgotten how chatty it could make her. _Maybe another vodka will shut me up._

The sentinel looked at her now forlorn drinking companion. "How did you get the eyes thing?"

The infiltrator shrugged. "I was at the Battle of the Citadel. The first one. My cruiser was shot down by the Reaper and we were going down. Hard. I was ordering everyone out of the ship. I grabbed one of my good friends and threw her into the escape pod. The hole in the ship was creating the vacuum that threatened to pull this guy, a guy that I was actually kind of sweet on, out of the ship. I tried to reach out to him. But the emergency bulkheads sealed the small section I was in off from the vacuum. It closed on my arm." Clara lifted up her right arm. "I lost my right arm just below the shoulder. Shepard saved the day, and I was discharged out of the Alliance. They paid for my rehab and shit, but I knew that there was things in the dark, things to fight. And I couldn't do that as a one-armed freak. That's when Cerberus approached me. They knew the score. They knew that they needed people to fight with Shepard, or in her memory at the time. The offered me a new arm. It's a prototype of some sort. Of course I took them up on it. I signed up. They rebuilt me, they gave me equipment, and purpose again. And that was when the whispers started. The voices in my dreams. And before I knew it, my thoughts weren't my own anymore. Shepard had exposed Cerberus for the indoctrinated bastards that they always were and I couldn't do anything to stop myself. I knew what I was doing was wrong but I didn't have the power to stop myself. And slowly, my voice started to get drowned out by the whispers, and the voice of the Illusive Man. Then suddenly it is all over. I wake up, the war is over, Shepard's a hero. And I keep thinking is all of this worth it? Or is that next bullet in my gun only fit to go through my own skull? And I still hear the voices, in my dreams."

Clara filled up her glass and downed the entire thing in one large gulp.

"For what it's worth," the asari started, "I like your eyes. They are kind of pretty."

She reached across the sullen human and grabbed her right hand.

"And this is pretty awesome. It feels like the real thing. You are a lucky lady."

"Gee, thanks," Clara said unconvinced.

"And you've got a purpose now. We've got to stop the bad indoctrinated people. You're a good one."

"How do you know?"

Alleis smiled. "Asari intuition."

The human smiled a bit, but covered it with a yawn.

She suddenly realized she had been awake for almost a full day now. Through the drunken haze she wasn't worried about seeing the desert again.

"Maybe it is time to sleep," the considerably less drunk, but still tipsy, Alleis said.

She backed away from the railing they had been leaning against and realized she never took her hand back from Clara's arm.

"Well someone has to finish the vodka first," Clara responded.

Alleis looked at the bottle, there was barely enough to fill a glass. "And there is no way it is going to be you."

Clara looked disappointed but the asari downed the last drops directly from the bottle.

She stuck out her tongue in disgust after she finished it.

"Tastes better, doesn't it?" Clara asked.

"Not really."

"I thought good company made it taste better."

"Then it's your fault," Alleis retorted.

"Ooh, good one," Clara said as they stumbled into the room. The human leaned against the wall and slumped down to the floor. Alleis joined her, albeit a little more gracefully.

"Did I pass?" the asari mumbled between extended yawns.

Clara looked at her blue companion. "Pass what?"

"The interrogation."

"I felt like the one being interrogated," Clara complained.

"You didn't have to share if you didn't want to."

"I felt like I should."

"Thanks for telling me though."

"No problem. And yeah, I think you did pass. At least this round."

"Oh good," Alleis responded before her eyelids closed and she fell asleep.

Clara followed her a second later.

In their sleep the pair slumped together. Clara's head rested on Alleis' shoulder and the asari's head found the human's hair strangely comfortable. Or maybe that was the alcohol.


	8. Insanity

**Insanity**

The drunk duo's sleep was not disturbed by Kurana's fevered dreaming or the talking in her sleep. They didn't even wake when the female turian fell out of her seat and started thrashing on the ground.

But they did wake when Kurana started screaming.

Clara's drunken haze prevented her from snapping awake. She couldn't find her gun.

She vowed to never drink again as she rushed over to her convulsing comrade.

"Kurana?" Clara asked trying to get her to wake up.

"What's happening?" the hungover asari asked.

"I have no idea! Kurana! Wake up!" Clara yelled.

The turian's glowing blue eyes snapped open and locked on Clara's. Then the turian started coughing. Harsh, whole body shaking coughs.

"What's happening to you?" Clara asked.

But the turian only had enough breath to cough some more. It got so bad that she started hacking up something.

Kurana coughed up a brown mass into Clara's hand.

The human stared at it in fear. In her hand was a clump of sand. It slipped through her fingers, and the grains formed a small pile on the ground.

The turian continued to cough up sand as the asari looked on in horror.

With one last, horrible, sand choked cough the turian subsided. At first Clara thought she was dead, but when her chest rose and fell the human relaxed.

"This is bad," Alleis said. "We need to get her to a doctor."

"Sand, she was coughing up sand," Clara said, still wide eyed at the substance in her hand.

"What?" the asari asked.

"The sand," Clara said holding up her hand.

"That's… Clara, that's blood. That's not sand."

Clara was stunned into silence for a second. It _was_ sand. She could feel the texture in her hand. Its dry weight. Each individual grain in her hand. But when she looked back at her hand it wasn't covered with light brown grains, but the dark blood of the turian.

It was all over her hand and it was all over the floor.

"What the fuck?" Clara whispered.

She could _see_ the blood now. But she could _feel_ the sand. Her mind couldn't process it. It just shut down as the human stared at the blood in her hand, oblivious to everything about her.

Alleis meanwhile grabbed her armor's last dose of medi-gel and gave it to the turian. When she got the turian stabilized, and moved to the only bed, she returned to the human.

"Clara?" she asked gently. The dirty blonde haired woman just stared at her blood covered hand. It was as if she was feeling the blood, trying to convince herself it was real. "Clara? Snap out of it."

The human didn't move. Alleis knelt next to her and wiped the blood off of Clara's hand with a towel she found on the ground.

"Hey, are you ok?" Alleis asked.

"What?" Clara asked.

"Are you ok?"

"No. No I'm really not. I think I'm farther gone than I originally thought," the human said. She felt the rise of tears. "I need you to kill me."

"What?!"

"It is only now that I realize I've been having this intense hallucinations. The same hallucinations that Kurana had and now she is like that. I can't do it myself. I need you to do it for me," Clara explained.

"Didn't you tell me something last night about not adding unnecessarily to the galaxy's already staggering body count?"

"This is different. I don't want to become one of the bad guys again."

"So don't."

"I don't know if I can help it."

"Here," Alleis told her as she grabbed a pillow from the bed and gave it to Clara, "sleep. I'll see if I can find you a blanket. Just rest."

Clara took the pillow and retreated to the corner of the room. She suddenly felt very tired, but her old fear of sleep had started to creep back into her mind.

But the desert would not be denied.

Alleis was looking in one of the small cupboards for a blanket.

A gust of wind came from nowhere. The wind was so strong that it started to knock the few things in the room over. The chair was flung violently into the wall. When it made contact it burst into sand. Clara started to panic.

Kurana's prone form started to be eroded by the wind as it ripped the turian apart piece by piece and turned her into grains of sand that got whipped up into the growing storm happening in the tiny room.

"Alleis! Help! What is happening?!" Clara yelled.

The asari turned around and extended a hand to her, but she faced the same fate as the turian. She started to be dissolved into grains of sand.

Clara tried to reach out to her but she was suddenly enveloped by quicksand. It was taking a hold of her and sucking her in as the asari rumbled completely to dust.

"No!" cried Clara before her words were choked away by the hot, dry sand.

A moment later she found herself in the middle of the same featureless, sandstorm. In that desert that she had feared to return to.

She felt the compulsion, the order, to walk through the storm, to find her way out and find the others in the valley.

That was the last thing the woman wanted. She knew that there was… someone… waiting for her back wherever it was she had come from. But she didn't know how to get back there.

The sandstorm obscured all sense of direction. And it cut at her skin, trying to force her into movement.

But this time, this time the woman didn't want to listen to her foreign compulsions. She wanted to go back. There was something she had to do.

The wind picked up, making the grains of sand even more dagger like.

She heard a whisper on the wind. It was the word she feared.

"Submit."

She took one step forward and it felt good. It was a surprisingly easy step forward.

And yet she knew it was wrong.

Fighting every inch of herself, and the increasingly painful winds, the woman sat down. Her limbs felt like solid pieces of lead, unwilling or unable to bend or move.

She struggled to bring her knees to her chin. When she finally accomplished that task, she hugged her legs.

She tried to wait out the storm.

Each individual grain of sand started to whisper to her.

"Submit."

But she didn't want to.

For the first time in a while, she cried.

The wind grew even faster. It was like she was trapped inside a hurricane of sand. The shards cut at her skin, rubbed it till it bled. If the storm couldn't get her to move, then it would erase her from the galaxy, one molecule at a time.

She didn't cry out in pain or let out any sign of the intense pain she was feeling.

Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the storm gave way to the room she fell asleep in.

But that didn't make her feel any better.

Baht and Alleis were talking near the doorway, at the opposite end of the room that Clara fell asleep in.

The batarian handed the asari some things and promptly left again.

Alleis looked in the bag and pulled out some food items and put them down on the tiny desk near the door. She found a supply of medi-gel near the bottom of the bag. She took a single dose and applied it to the still unconscious Kurana.

"How long have I been asleep?" Clara asked as she unfolded herself from the floor.

"About a day," Alleis explained. "Your batarian friend stopped by and I made requests for food and medical supplies which he helpfully provided."

She explained this as she took another medi-gel packet and placed it inside of her armor.

"I used the last of it to keep Kurana stable earlier," she explained.

Clara walked over to the asari who was looking over the food that had just gotten delivered. Alleis asked her, "You want anything?"

The human looked over the meager offerings and grabbed a small self-contained noodle packet. Alleis had already opened hers.

They ate in silence.

When they finished the asari looked over Clara. Even though she had slept for almost twenty hours, most of it involved lots of twitching and more than a little muttering. The words were indecipherable for Alleis and her translator. The human looked as though she didn't get any sleep at all.

"How are you feeling?" Alleis asked.

"Exhausted. Sore," Clara responded.

"What happened to you two?"

Clara didn't respond.

Instead she went through the back that Baht had brought. In the bottom were two bottles of a gin entitled "Dead Reaper Gin". The title made Clara half smile. She looked at the label and apparently it was a gin that was being produced to fill the alcohol gap in the galaxy. It was advertised as cheap and effective.

She held the bottle up for the asari to look over. Alleis read the words and smiled.

"You certainly have a one track mind don't you?"

Clara only shrugged. She found the glasses they used the previous night and filled them up with the clear Dead Reaper Gin and handed one glass to the asari before heading outside to drink on the balcony.

Alleis joined Clara after a few seconds.

Clara had already drunk half of her gin before Alleis had even tasted hers.

"Well I think I like this better than the vodka," she said with a pained expression on her face. "But not by much."

Clara just smiled.

"So can you tell me what happened to you?" she asked. "Why is Kurana having seizures, and why are you so afraid to sleep?"

Clara downed her gin. "You're an observant one."

"I do my best."

Clara poured another glass of the clear alcohol. "The cult leader attacked us. I knew him from… before. Except that he was completely indoctrinated. The whole glowing, solid blue eyes, cracked skin thing. And he put his hands on my head and I could feel his… will… his mind invading mine trying to shut me down and take me over. It was incredibly painful. I panicked and tried to shoot him. He let me go, but he got to Kurana and he had more time to destroy her than he did with me."

Alleis dropped her eyes from Clara. She was looking at her own gin. Which she swallowed in one gulp.

"It sounds," she said before pausing to let the burning of the gin fade from her tongue before continuing. "It sounds like the Ardat-Yakshi."

"The what?" Clara asked while pouring more alcohol for them both.

"It is an old asari word for 'demon of the night winds'. I don't know where it comes from either. But they are like… asari serial killers. When the bonding happens between an asari and anyone else the nervous systems intertwine and two becomes one, greater than the sum of its parts. But with an Ardat-Yakshi the process isn't gentle, two becomes one but the one is the Ardat-Yakshi. They drain everything out of you and shut you down. They kill your mind from the inside. But they are so… intoxicating. They command your attention through pure sex appeal. You want to do anything for them so that when it comes time to hallow you out, you are practically begging for it."

Alleis downed her gin and Clara sipped hers.

After a few minutes of silently watching the swarming crowd below them Clara said, "It sounds like you know from personal experience."

Alleis stared at the bottom of her empty glass which Clara took as an invitation to fill it up. "Let's see. It was about four years ago now. I wanted to be a painter. This beautiful asari come to the station I was living in. She was confident and wonderful and took a liking to me. It was the first time anyone looked at me like that. Like they just needed me. And maybe that is why I was so open for… Anyways we had hit it off, and when it came time to… do it… it suddenly turned dark and painful. I remember feeling like I was being…"

"Ripped apart atom by atom from the inside of your mind outwards," Clara finished for her.

They drank in silence for a long moment.

"Yeah… Before she could kill me completely someone stopped her. All of a sudden this brilliant white light appeared. I don't know if this actually happened, I was really out of it," Alleis hastened to add. "But this even more gorgeous Justicar shows up and fights the Ardat-Yakshi off of me. The biotic battle was insane, but the Ardat-Yakshi just kind of disappears after knocking the Justicar off balance. She took me to the hospital. I was in intensive care for over a week before I was able to leave the hospital."

"That when you decided to be a Justicar?" Clara asked.

"Yup."

"An interesting career choice. You don't strike me as the 'ends justify the means' type. You seem too… upbeat for that."

"Thanks?"

Clara shrugged and said, "Just an observation."

"I hope we get a mission soon," Alleis said.

"Me too. What did Baht say? Does he care if you join the team?"

"He didn't care. Although he said he'd need to double check with his boss first, but that he hasn't been able to get in contact with them for a while."

"Yeah, this is a strange setup," Clara admitted. "I can't be sure if I am doing the right thing."

"Think about all the people we saved, surely that is a good thing?"

"I also worked for Cerberus when we… they took down the Collector home world," Clara said.

"I see your point. It does make me uneasy that I don't know who I'm working for," Alleis admitted.

"It's the Shadow Broker," Clara blurted out. "Ha, oops. I don't know if I was supposed to tell you that."

Alleis shrugged. "It could be worse. You know I heard the Shadow Broker was on Earth for the Reaper invasion."

"I heard that too. But how does anyone even know that for sure?"

"I don't know. But I do know that the Broker was responsible for getting the Alliance a whole bunch of people and materials for the Crucible."

"Interesting," Clara said. After she took another sip of gin she said, "You know, I'd like to see what you can paint."

Alleis smiled sheepishly. "I haven't touched a brush in years. I wouldn't be very good. I don't think I was very good to begin with."

"Well if you won't show me then how can you know if you weren't any good?"

Alleis shrugged and drank some gin.

For several quiet minutes the pair drank and watched Omega's population bustle about. From above it all, it looked so much more peaceful. The heat wasn't nearly as bad.

"One more question," Clara says.

A slightly drunk Alleis turned her gaze back to the scarred face of the human, "Yes?"

"What was with that speech you gave before you attacked us?"

If it was possible for an asari to blush, Alleis was doing it then. Clara couldn't tell if it was actually a reddening of her solid blue cheeks or it was the glow of Omega on her smooth skin.

"I felt like I needed to issue a challenge, and say something inspiring and heroic. You know like those awesome one-liners in the movies," she mentions. "I wanted to be like…"

"Don't say Blasto, don't say Blasto," Clara whispered.

"Blasto or something," Alleis finished.

And for the first time in a long time, Clara laughed.

At first Alleis grew even more embarrassed. She turned her gaze down and away from the laughing human.

But as the laughs continued, Alleis found herself grinning too. Clara had an infectious laugh. And try as she might, Alleis eventually started laughing at herself. She couldn't tell if it was actually funny, the alcohol, Clara, or a combination of all of three.

Clara wiped tears from her eyes and apologized in between small boughts of laughter.

"Sorry," Clara said. "You can't take your badass cues from a hanar."

Alleis laughed. "I never thought of it like that."

Clara laughed again before she said, "And you missed the whole 'one liner' thing. It is supposed to be one short sentence. Not a mini-speech."

They laughed again for a bit.

Clara poured them both the last of the gin.

"Wow, I never realized how bad it was," the asari said.

"It was bad," Clara told her. "Just keep it short or don't say anything at all."

"Easy for you to say! You are the silent, stoic type until I get you drunk," the asari accused.

"Well, you got me there," Clara said. "Alcohol makes me a chatter box."

The lapsed into a nice quiet. Neither felt the need to speak, so they just enjoyed each other's quiet company.

"If it wasn't for the war and all of… this," Alleis said with a gesture to the world around them, "what would you do with your life?"

Clara remained quiet. "I honestly have no idea. I joined the Alliance the second I turned eighteen. I hated the colony life. It was so boring. And when I was injured I mostly spent my time in bars getting drunk or wishing I was dead. Without this, I don't know what I would do. Before this I was drifting along."

Alleis said, "No family? No friends? No… paramour?"

"Family all died in the first invasion of Eden Prime," Clara commiserated. She finished her glass of gin with a toast to the family long gone. "Friends tend to abandon you when you join a terrorist organization. And within Cerberus they are all business. And I've never really gotten terribly close with anyone. Alliance regs frown on fraternization, Cerberus was full of racists and ice queens."

"You'll find something."

"Maybe."

Clara yawned. "Shit. I've only been awake for like four hours and I feel like sleeping again."

"It has been rough, you deserve some rest," Alleis said reassuringly.

Clara went back into the apartment, leaving Alleis to finish her glass of gin. She said a silent toast before downing the alcohol.

When she entered the room, Clara had curled up in the corner again and was already gently snoozing. The asari smiled a touch. For the first time the human looked calm. Her face wasn't tensed up with worry and anxiety or fear. The numerous scars crisscrossing her face had smoothed out and faded a touch. So she looked more like a sleeping veteran than a wounded animal.

Alleis lay down near the snoozing Clara and eventually fell asleep.

For Clara she wasn't beaconed by the desert this time. This time she chose to go into the storm. She had an idea and she hoped it would work.

First she needed to find the valley, and then she needed to find a turian.

The storm was as bad as she remembered it, but this time it didn't hurt her. In fact she could barely even feel it on her skin any more.

The word cut through the storm as it did before, "Submit."

This time a different word killed the whirling sands, "No."

The second the word escaped her lips, the sands settled and the skies cleared. She found herself on the lip of the cliff looking down at the sea of indoctrinated.

She had no want to go down there, other than the desire to find her turian comrade.

The descent down the cliff to the valley was simpler than it should have been. In no time at all she was at the bottom, in the mass of people. They were all looking forward, at someone.

Someone was speaking to the crowd in a silky smooth voice, the kind that enters your ears and stays with you forever. The kind of voice that gives you chills just hearing anything being said. The voice that could compel you to do anything and you would do it.

For a time the voice fell on her deaf ears. But even she knew that she couldn't avoid listening to it for too long. Near the back of the crowd was an enraptured turian female.

She recognized her compatriot. The woman walked up to the dazed turian and grabbed her arms. The enthralled moved under no power of her own. And the woman had to drag her along.

It took some time, but eventually they left the valley and returned to the desert where the sandstorm returned with a vengeance and successfully cut off the turian from the seducing voice.

"What's happening?" the turian asked as she exited the daze.

"Let's go home."

Clara woke up in the small room they had occupied for three days now. She glanced over at the turian and hoped her harebrained plan worked.

The turian on the bed stirred and sat up.

"What the hell happened?" she asked.

Clara smiled and was about to explain when Baht threw open the door.

"Wake up ladies. We got work to do."


	9. The Lights in Your Eyes

_Author's Note: I'm not terribly proud of this chapter, but stick with me for a bit. The next one will be a bit of a break, but some fun ME main character building. Should be fun. I hope._

**The Lights in Your Eyes**

Baht led the three ladies down to a small spaceport inside Omega. There a skeleton crew of Shadow Broker agents awaited them with a small space craft. Baht walked past the group and entered the craft. He led them to a central room off the small CIC that had the QEC equipment hastily jammed into it.

The Shadow Broker's image appeared before them.

"I'll be brief. I have things to do. The Controlled have attacked some friends of mine on Rannoch. Find out why. Stop them. Baht is still in charge. Report any findings," the Shadow Broker told them before signing off.

Baht turned to them, "Got it?"

"Is this our ship?" Alleis asked.

"Yes, I'm taking the commander's quarters upstairs; you guys can fight over the rest of the ship. We have a skeleton crew. A salarian pilot, an engineer, and our information team. We leave for Rannoch," said Baht. The last sentence was said loudly so that the com system relayed the message to the pilot. "Oh and the Shadow Broker had a room especially set up for you two. It is an anti-indoctrination room. We can keep… prisoners there if need be. They based the technology off of some stuff gotten from the Leviathan of Dis."

And with that he left the room.

The women looked at each other.

"Well I want to meet the crew," Alleis said.

Clara nodded in agreement.

"I'm going to find a place to stay, out of the way," Kurana said as she headed towards the elevator that Baht had just taken up.

"Out of the way of what?" Clara asked.

Alleis let out a snort and covered her mouth.

Clara allowed herself to have a half grin as they walked out of the QEC room and into the CIC. It was a small room, nowhere near the large CIC's of a combat vessel. But it had an extra-net console and the galaxy map.

The pair decided it would be bad to bug the pilot while he was navigating the ship through the troubled airspace of Omega. So they decided that they wanted to meet this 'information team' Baht mentioned. So they decided to check the lower deck where all the crew rooms and mess hall were located.

When the elevator opened the two compatriots saw a salarian and a turian watching an extra-net feed.

"Hey," Alleis stared.

"Sh sh sh," the salarian said.

"Aria is officially taking control of Omega now," the turian male said.

They sat down and watched the steam for a bit. Aria T'Loak was announcing that she was forming a government and the first thing she was doing was taking all of the mercenary bands who answered directly to her, organized for her by the Reaper Killer Commander Shepard, were being reconstituted into a police force. The biggest upset of the announcement was a one time job offer for all Archangels to join Aria or be branded as criminals and killed later.

"Sure you don't want to go back?" Clara asked the asari.

"I think we are doing more important work," she commented.

They watched the official Queen of Omega make her statements about future plans before they both grew bored and decided to check on the engineer. The man who ran the engines of their new space worthy home.

"I'm glad we left when we did," Clara said.

"Yes, it is about to get very messy in Omega," Alleis agreed.

Behind the mess hall was a cramped and dark back room where the lone engineer monitored and fixed any engine problems.

"Hello?" Alleis called.

A suit covered head popped up from within one of the engine systems and said, "What?"

A quarian was busy fixing the engines and arguing with the pilot.

"This ship is brand new and you already screwed things up for me down here! This was supposed to be a smooth flight!" the quarian yelled.

"I am simply making the ship function as efficiently as possible," the salarian pilot retorted.

"Efficient for the pilot doesn't mean efficient for the ship!"

Alleis tried to get in a word or two, but the two kept arguing.

"Well I guess everyone is busy," Clara remarked.

"Shall we check the cargo hold?" Alleis asked.

"I guess," Clara said. She knew that the indoctrination cell was there and while she was intrigued by the implication, she was worried about what it might mean for her.

The cargo hold was small, even for the ship. There was the small armory, a comparatively large shuttle that looked like it was probably a third the size of the ship itself so it didn't look like it would be used much, and a hastily built cube in the far back.

Alleis approached it first, Clara standing farther back. Was it some kind of neutralization field? Would it burn the indoctrinated implants out of her? Would it just nuke her?

All of these thoughts and more raced through her mind.

The asari studied the room with her omni-tool for a bit.

"Interesting," she said.

"Is it going to fry me when I step inside?" Clara asked.

"No," the joke sailed over Alleis' head. "It looks like it is a complex seal to cut off all kinds of communication frequencies. Beyond the number that should be reasonably transmittable across space."

"This is the Reaper's we are talking about. They're ridiculous."

"True. So basically it is just a quiet room," Alleis said as she stepped inside it.

"You sure this is safe?"

The asari smiled and waved her omni-tool. The wall descended and the tech field came up around it. She spun around and smiled. She waved her omni-tool and the field lifted and the wall came up.

"You should try it in here," Alleis said. "It's so calm in here."

Clara took a tentative step inside the room. It was bare, and square, and rather boring.

Alleis closed the room and lowered the field.

Instantly all the background noise went away and Clara felt alone. The only thing she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, and the respiration of the asari next to her.

No subtle whispers that would occasionally sneak through tell her to submit to their will.

She smiled. It really was incredibly calm in the room.

Clara could almost hear the asari smile. "What do you think?"

The indoctrinated human smiled, "I like this room. I think I'll make it my bed room."

"You don't want to sleep in the crew quarters. And this room is basically made of windows. You won't have any privacy," the asari pointed out.

"Privacy from who? There are seven people on this ship. And this is a Shadow Broker ship. I assume he's got cameras and bugs everywhere in here," Clara observed.

"An excellent point," the asari conceded.

"You going to claim a bunk in the crew quarters?" Clara asked.

"I don't really fancy sleeping on the floor anymore."

"Good point," the human replied. "Well I think I'm going to go steal a mattress and some other stuff from the quarters and move it down here."

The two left the quiet sanctuary to head up to the crew deck. The information team was still busy watching the Aria announcement.

So they snuck around the two to get into the crew quarters. Alleis took an empty bunk and Clara grabbed the stuff off another bunk. The mattress and pillow and blankets. She pulled it out of the bunk and proceeded to drop it all on the ground.

"Shit this is heavy," Clara said.

"You want some help?" Alleis asked as Clara tried to lift the too heavy, too big mattress.

"Yes, please," the human strained.

With the help of a second person the mattress moving went a lot easier. The Broker agents barely looked up at them.

They got inside the sealed room and they threw the mattress down. The two of them sat down on the only piece of furniture.

Clara lowered the field and reveled in the sounds of silence which consisted of only the sounds of labored breathing.

"It is starting to feel like home already," Clara said, savoring the silence in her mind that was only her own thoughts for once. She turned to the blue asari beside her, "Thanks for the help."

Alleis smiled, "No problem. If you don't mind, I'm just going to sit here for a second to catch my breath."

Clara nodded, saving her breath.

Alleis just looked at Clara for a bit. "Your eyes…"

"What about them?" Clara said suddenly panicked. Did the indoctrination get worse? Are her eyes turning fully iridescent blue now?

"They are just a lovely shade of green. I never noticed because of the indoctrination coloring." For the first time, the indoctrination coloring had faded just a bit.

"Oh, thanks," Clara was the one to blush this time. Her skin turned red beneath the numerous scars.

Clara couldn't avert her eyes from the deep blue, almost purple eyes of the asari. She did blink once and that was when she felt the soft lips of the asari pressed against her own dry and cracked ones.

For the first time that Clara could remember, her mind was completely and utterly blank.

She couldn't think of how she should react, or what this all meant, or… anything really.

A few seconds, or was it minutes, later the asari backed away again.

"I guess I'll be going," Alleis said as she exited the enclosed room.

Clara wanted to stop her and get her to stay, but the want hadn't correctly translated itself into a coherent thought until the asari had left the cargo deck.

"Shit," Clara muttered. How was she supposed to sleep now? She thought that a cold shower might help. She was about to stand up to go fix the situation, but then she realized that the showers were on another floor.

"Double shit," she said as she flopped down on the bed and fell asleep instead.


	10. Secret Conversations

_Author's Note: This is the last chapter I can post for a while, so enjoy some Liara and assorted other squadmates. This is it for a week. Enjoy._

**Secret Conversations**

The light blue asari took the few minutes of silence she had to punch up a number for an old contact of hers.

"Ms. Lawson," she said when the human appeared.

"Ms. T'Soni, or is it Misses now?" the confident ex-Cerberus agent smiled.

Liara smiled. "Oh you know."

"Shouldn't you be resting right now?" Miranda asked. "Shepard wouldn't be too happy if she knew you were working."

Liara fidgeted in the bed she was currently confined to. "You're right. She wouldn't be happy, which is why I was hoping we could make this quick."

"What do you need oh illustrious Shadow Broker?"

"There is a… concern brewing out in the Terminus. I have an agent looking into it, but the situation requires more help than my organization can spare."

"Oh no, I'm not going to be roped into another one of your schemes. Shepard would kill me," Miranda said. "And you."

"You didn't let me finish," Liara chided. "I have a new operative, ex-Cerberus."

Miranda's attention was piqued. "Pre- or post-indoctrination?"

"Post, definitely post."

"Are you sure you can trust them? I've been hearing stories about the indoctrinated forces. Lots of them have been breaking out of the various prisons they've been held in. They are organizing."

"That's why I'm concerned. I don't have anyone else I can send, but I need to know everything about her," Liara said. "Just look through your Cerberus archives and see what you can find?"

Miranda nodded, "I'll put the Alliance's requests on hold for right now. They just want all of the Cerberus information declassified and every test and lab secured. It will be a break from the tedium."

"I already sent the information," Liara said.

"I'll look into and let you know," Miranda said. "And I promise I'll visit soon."

"If you don't Shepard will hunt you down."

"Talk to you later T'Soni."

"Goodbye Lawson."

The call ended and Liara took a deep breath. She listened to the silence around her. The monitor next to her didn't make a sound. No sounds of crying made it through. She knew that Shepard had probably fallen asleep while playing guard so she had enough time to make the next call.

A quarian answered the call this time.

"Liara! How are you doing?" Tali cried. "It's late why are you even up? Shouldn't you be resting?"

"I'm laying down now," Liara said. Part of her wanted to be annoyed at all the mothering she was getting from all of her old friends, but she liked the fact that they all took a vested interest in her health and safety. "I called to ask a favor."

"Garrus is already packing for the trip," Tali said. "We should be there in a couple of days."

"Shepard will be pleased."

"Have you decided on a name yet?" Tali asked excitedly. "You know Tali is a nice strong name."

"I was going to let Shepard decide, but…"

"But what?"

"She says that she wants to call her either 'Commander' or 'Shepard' since no one ever uses her first name," Liara smiled. "I think I might have to revoke naming privileges."

Tali laughed. "How is your daughter doing?"

"Good. Healthy. Strong like her dad. She's already got that mischievous gleam in her eye and she's only a week old," Liara took the opportunity to brag. "But you'll have to see when you get here."

"Well if Garrus can stop arguing with the contractors who are building the house we can leave soon," Tali said.

"Actually I was calling on Shadow Broker business," Liara said hating to ask a favor of such a close friend.

"Shepard couldn't convince you to stop doing that even with the baby?" Tali said in the tone of voice one has when scolding a small child.

"She knows I need to keep myself busy."

"What do you need Broker?"

"I have a team coming to Rannoch to investigate the attack from two days ago. Can you give them a hand, and just keep an eye on them? There probably won't be any combat. I just need someone I trust to get eyes on them," Liara explained.

"Do you not trust your own team?"

"Not so much. Two of them are indoctrinated but I have no else to send. So far they have proved trustworthy but…"

"They are indoctrinated and they are never safe," Tali said. "Very well. I'll keep an eye on them. Send me their details."

"Thank you Tali. And when you finish you should come see us."

"We will."

"Goodbye."

"Bye."

Liara finished the call and put away her things. She was exhausted. Sleep was beginning to creep up on her. Her eyes started to close when she heard a noise on the monitor in the baby's room.

She instantly sat bolt upright and her heart started pumping quickly. The adrenaline banished all thoughts of sleep.

But it wasn't the sounds of crying or the moans of a baby missing its mother.

It was a voice.

The whispered voice of Commander Shepard speaking to her sleeping daughter.

"Hey little girl," she whispered, barely audible through the monitor. "I hope you are ready for a boring life. Because I've worked damn hard to make sure that there is going to be no threat to you or anyone else. This galaxy is going to be safe and at peace one way or another. Because you're here now and I won't let anything happen to you. It's a promise."

Liara smiled, and tried to blink away a tear. Her daughter had the best father she could hope for. And she knew first hand Shepard's promises weren't something she gave away lightly. She once promised to always return to Liara. And she crawled back from death twice just to keep that promise. And if she made a promise like that to her daughter, Liara knew that Shepard would keep it.

"And your mom is working hard at protecting you too. Even if she ignores me and keeps working at all hours of the night," Shepard whispered across the monitor at Liara.

"I'm going to sleep now," she whispered back knowing full well that Shepard couldn't hear her.

"I'll be there in a second Liara," Shepard whispered. "Sleep tight kid."


	11. Old Tech and New AI

_Author's Note: Excuse me while I just post this here before disappearing again. I hope you like this chapter that I don't particularly feel too proud of._

**Old Tech and New AI**

Baht woke Clara up when they were about to enter the last relay into the home system of the quarian people.

"Come on, we got work to do," the batarian told the sleepy human.

For the first time Clara hadn't dreamed of the desert when copious amounts of alcohol wasn't involved. She exited her makeshift bedroom and made a pit stop at the bathroom before convening at the armory.

"The Broker sprung for specific armor for you two," he said to Clara and Kurana who had spent her time beneath the engine room.

Clara found a set of armor colored in the Shadow Broker's white and muted red colors awaiting her. She tried out the tactical cloak and she disappeared from view for a bit. It wasn't set to her preferences, but for now it would do. And she took the new combat grade omni-tool presented to her.

The female turian put on her Cabal armor. It was different from regulation turian armor, and it came with a set of claws on each arm that were coated in poison.

"That feels better," Kurana said.

Clara was watching her. Her eyes, at least to the other indoctrinated person in the room, looked even more blue than usual. Instead of the three individual small blue spheres in the turian's dark irises, the iris turned into a solid iridescent blue.

Or maybe she was just crazy.

But then she _felt_ the turian's presence in the room like a beacon. If everyone else was a candle then Kurana was a sun.

She was definitely crazy.

No one else seemed to notice.

"Everybody ready?" Baht asked.

It looked like the information gathering team, the salarian and the turian that watched Aria take over Omega, were coming with them.

"I'm Aten Kruim," the turian announced. "Information specialist. My specialty is personnel intelligence."

The salarian frowned, "He means he is an interrogation specialist. Crude and brutal."

"Without my help you would die before you got any information out of a living being," Aten said.

"I am Doak Arneon," the salarian informed them. "I am the tech specialist. There is no system that I can't get information from. The brute here is former C-Sec."

"I left the Citadel when they wrote off Sovereign as an isolated incident."

"I was STG until the Union refused to join the Alliance in the Crucible project until our world burned. I refuse to get embroiled in salarian politics ever again."

Baht stopped any further team building with a forceful, "Let's stop screwing around and go."

Clara felt like she should discuss what happened with Alleis, but they were departing for the mission.

They sat next to each other as the ship descended to the planet's surface, the shuttle was silent.

Until the turian and salarian started whispering to each other heatedly. Eventually they came to some kind of agreement and shook hands.

"What was that about?" Alleis asked.

"Nothing," Aten says tersely. It is clear that it was a private conversation.

"We are taking bets on how long it will take you and the human to get together," the salarian chimed in.

Aten's response was the hit the salarian. "No interference!"

Clara blushed, and Alleis went quiet and said nothing.

They landed on the planet and everyone began to disembark. But Clara held Alleis back for a quick conversation.

"I wanted to talk to you," Clara whispered.

"I did too," Alleis said. "I'm sorry for what I did if it upset you."

"No, no, no. Hold on," Clara said. "You should really let me go first. I want to say that I enjoyed it, even though I might not have been a very active participant… It is just that it has been a very long time since I've been close to anyone, and then there is this whole indoctrination thing that I fear will overwhelm me at any moment. If we could, do you think you would mind waiting for some of this to get sorted before we do anything about it?"

Alleis smiled. She originally planned on putting an end to anything between them because of the human's unresponsiveness to her advances. So the asari was glad that she let the human go first. It is true that there was a lot going on, and perhaps it was simply best if they just let it hang over them for the time being and let it work itself out.

"Ok, we'll talk afterwards," Alleis said feeling much more relieved.

The area of Rannoch they landed on was very rocky, but they looked out on the oceans. The world so far was arid and there was little planet life.

A quarian walked up to the group and announced herself, "I am Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch."

At first Clara couldn't tell the difference between this quarian and the others that surrounded the newly built star port. Until she noticed the reverence the other quarians gave to Tali, the way they walked out of her way and went silent when she spoke. The quarian that served with Commander Shepard and helped her kill the Reapers.

And she couldn't help but think about what kind of pull the Shadow Broker had to involve two of the people that worked directly with the Reaper Killer. First Aria T'Loak, who was merely an acquaintance of the Shepard, but now Tali'Zorah? She is still a close personal friend of the Commander. But here she is running a lowly mission for the Broker.

Either the Broker had more pull than Clara could comprehend, or this mission was more important than she knew. And she didn't know which scared her more.

"The Shadow Broker tells me that you are here to investigate the indoctrinated attack that happened here two days ago?" Tali asks the Broker agents.

Baht seemed to care little for the quarian's rank or importance, "Yes, could you take us to the location and tell us what happened?"

"Two days ago and unauthorized vessel lands on Rannoch, before we can get any personnel to investigate the indoctrinated forces attacked our people, killed a few and made off with a geth unit. Shepard and I worked too hard to get my people to cooperate with the geth to let some bosh'tet come invade out home and screw everything up," Tali explained as they walked through the small town of converted starships.

The new capital of Rannoch, which the quarians were still bickering over the name of, was where they landed the majority of their fleet and started converting them into homes. It made for some strange architecture. The large, metal, and often rounded shapes of space freights turned into single family homes, or large buildings for multiple quarian families was a strange look.

But even stranger was the increasing number of homes built of Rannoch stone. They were usually square and solid looking, without much creativity carved into the reddish quarian stone. And seemingly each house had a sign out in front that said, "Built by Urdnot Construction."

Urdnot Wrex, leader of the krogan people, had successfully rebuilt most of his home planet in only a few years. And when the krogan had taken to construction rather well, since they had a tendency for building structures that could survive enemy fire, their buildings were in demand. And the krogan sensed a business opportunity and started the official krogan construction business that specialized in building resilient homes, which given the recent war, people were very interesting in things that would last.

Clara smiled at the irony of the once harbingers of doom now rebuilding the galaxy.

They walked through the patch work, mismatched city and up to a small alcove in the outskirts of the city.

There was evidence of a firefight. Alleis stepped forward to investigate the battle to see what she could learn from it.

Before she could look for long, a humanoid figure in old Cerberus fatigues jumped out of an alley way and took a pot shot at Alleis.

Clara let a sniper round penetrate through the attacker's shields and eye before anyone else reacted.

"I'm fine," the asari called as she summoned her tech armor.

A small contingency of Controlled forces attacked the Broker agents. It was evenly matched, six to six. Clara managed to put down another one, a rocket trooper on a roof, before anyone else made a move.

Kurana charged at the nearest foe and took a shotgun blast from Baht into the back of her shields.

Tali yelled some obscenities about her new home getting wrecked while she, and her combat drone, took out two of the indoctrinated.

Doak and Aten took down an engineer that was making things difficult with an automated turret.

The last one left got hit in the face with a concussion round from Baht. The round bypassed the shield and knocked the Controlled man out.

"Aten, he's all yours," Baht said.

Before the turian could do what he was brought there to do, Kurana cut the indoctrinated man's throat with her cabal claws.

"What the hell?" Clara asked.

"He deserved to die," Kurana said coldly, and evenly.

"Now we are leadless," the human said.

The turian said nothing just looked at the dying body of the Controlled.

"Anyone else survive?" Clara asked.

Doak looked up and shook his head.

Tali all the while remained silent and just watched the scene unfold. It was obvious that of the indoctrinated forces, Kurana was causing the most problems; and from her stance and body language she was under considerable stress. But to Tali it looked like the human, Clara, was under _more_ stress, but she was more in charge of what was happening. She would have some things to tell Liara.

"We could always ask the locals what they know," Tali offered.

Several bright geth heads had poked out of the surrounding buildings once the shooting ceased.

"I've never questioned a get before," Aten shrugged. "I don't know what to do here."

"I don't think I can hack one either," Doak said.

"You don't interrogate them," Tali said with an exasperated sigh. "You talk to them, they are people. Despite what some of my people would lead you to believe."

She walked up to the nearest geth and like a seasoned professional asked the unit if they saw what happened when the previous Controlled force land.

They barely finished asking the first AI what happened, which was a strange experience for all involved, when a geth unit ran into the square with an assault rifle in its hands.

It looked around and when it saw all of the dead bodies it bowed its head.

Tali walked over to the unit and said, "What is wrong?"

Some of the structures around the flashlight portion of the geth moved as if to indicate surprise. "Creator Zorah," the strange, flat robotic voice said, "this unit heard there was fighting in the square. I came to investigate."

"Why?" Clara asked. For what she saw of the small gathering of geth, it looked like most of them didn't carry weapons. In fact this one looked somewhat out of place with a rifle.

The geth's flaps twitched a bit, "The invaders took a geth from here. I hope to find it."

"What about this geth is important to you?" Tali asked.

The geth looked sad, "The kidnapped unit was… joined with this unit. We were planning to make a new AI."

"That's adorable," Alleis said out loud without meaning to.


	12. Revenge is an Emotion

_Author's Note: I'm feeling generous after my first review. Thank you for reading, you are all wonderful people. Now enjoy some returning ME companions and twist, and some angry geth. Woo._

**Revenge is an Emotion**

Once Alleis recovered from her outburst, the geth expert asked the platform if it wanted to help in the search for its companion unit.

"Yes please," the geth asked.

"Do you have any way of tracking your companion?" Alleis asked.

The geth hung his flashlight head, "No."

Even the simulated voice sounded depressed.

The geth engineering unit walked over to the salarian, who watched the artificial intelligent being with a watchful eye. The pair looked over the dead indoctrinated agents.

Doak eventually stumbled upon a still functional communication device. Which was odd, because none of the indoctrinated forces ever carried a communication device. As Clara knew, and as Alleis and Baht experienced, the indoctrinated forces managed to move and communicate on a subconscious level.

The salarian studied it with his omni-tool for all of a second before the geth snatched the device from Doak's hands.

"I was looking at that!" the salarian said indignantly.

"Geth much faster at analysis and hacking attempts," the geth explained without looking up from the tiny device.

Clara, Alleis, and the quarian Admiral watched the events unfold.

"I would say that it is a very human thing to do," Clara stated, "but…"

"The geth have continued to impress me," Tali said. "More and more I see the way they live and they get closer and closer to being… more quarian. No, that sounds wrong… More organic."

"I still can't believe that a geth is attempting to make a new life," Alleis said.

Clara chuckled, "You are very excited about that aren't you?"

"Yes! After all that the galaxy has lost it is especially nice to see new life being put into it," the asari explained.

"Especially after what happened to the geth with the Reaper's Revenge," Tali said with a sad edge to her voice.

"The what?" Clara asked.

"When Shepard fired the Crucible, the Reapers were all destroyed. But things that carried the Reaper Code were severely damaged. The relays, the Citadel, and the geth's true self awareness were all based almost entirely on the Reaper Code. We figure that the Reapers tried to take as much with them as they could. So the geth went from a couple million platforms and even more on servers to less than a couple thousand. And some of my people's attitudes towards our new allies certainly isn't helping matters," Tali answered.

Clara was going to inquire about quarian politics but the geth beeped loudly and said, "The device has been cracked."

The device connected with the other device and a voice asked across the channel, "Is it done? Have you finished the job?"

Tali instantly recognized the voice of a fellow quarian.

"Xen!" she cried followed by a string of swears. "I'll have you up on war crimes this time!"

The signal went dead but the geth simply said, "The signal has been traced to a small base on Rannoch's moon."

"You know the person on the line, Admiral?" Clara asked.

Tali sighed, "Former Admiral Xen was the reason that the quarians attacked the geth as the Reapers invaded. She almost got the Commander and I killed on several occasions. She wanted the war to get the geth under our control again, return them to their non-sentience, slave roles again. I got the entire Admiralty Board to resign after the war, and I threatened to have Xen brought up on war crimes if she continued her fanatical experimentation on the geth. Now she is working for indoctrinated forces who attacked our home world. I'll string her up for this."

Silence greeted the quarian's frank and angry rant about her fellow admiral. The only thing that was said was the geth saying, "Thank you Creator Zorah."

Baht motioned for his team, "Let's go. We've got a short window of time to get to the moon to get these bastards before they leave the system."

"I'm coming with you," Tali told him as they started to walk towards the ship.

"This unit would like to lend it's assistance as well," the geth said.

"This is starting to turn into a regular goddamn party," the batarian said.

"Admiral, we don't expect you to clean up our mess," Clara said.

"And I don't expect you to clean up ours," Tali explained. "Xen is my responsibility. And I won't let anyone suffer for her experiments."

"I would like to find my companion," the geth said.

"Anyone else you want to bring along?" Baht asked. He was trying to attempt sarcasm but it sounded like Tali ignored it.

"Garrus?" she said into her omni-tool communications. "How many times do I have to tell you that calibrating a gun has nothing to do with house building? Let the professionals we hired to build our house build it. Besides, we have some work to do. It's Xen. She's working with the indoctrinated that attacked. Be at the star port ready to go as soon as you can."

When they got to the ship, a formidable looking turian was waiting for them. Half of his face was scarred from when he was working with Shepard and got a rocket to the face.

"So it was Xen that got them behind the defenses then?" Garrus asked. "Any particular reason why?"

"She is working with the indoctrinated forces. The Shadow Broker is worried," Tali said pointedly as she embraced the turian.

"Well if the Shadow Broker requests our services, then who are we to refuse?" he chuckled.

The now large squad boarded the ship and Baht barked destination orders.

"Good to see we are keeping better company than Xen," Garrus said looking at Clara and the silent Kurana.

"The Shadow Broker trusts them," Tali said with one arm still around the turian.

"It could be worse, we could be fighting Reapers again. It feels like ages since we went into battle with each other," Garrus said to the woman on his arm.

"I am totally going to beat you this time," Tali told him.

"You have an unfair advantage with your combat drones and what not. I only have a good old fashioned gun."

Clara grinned at the happy couple and turned to the geth.

"Do you have a name that we organics can pronounce?" she asked. "I would like to call you something other than geth."

The geth's flaps moved as it thought. "You may call this unit 'Mark'."

"Interesting choice," Clara said. "Mark it is."

"It is a reference to where we got Legion's name from," Tali remarked. "Human Bible, gospel of Mark. There are actually quite a few Marks on Rannoch now."

Mark the geth hung its head.

Clara whispered to it, "I like it. I think it suits you."

Meanwhile Alleis was looking at awe at the assembled party.

"I feel a bit star struck," the asari told the only human in the room.

Clara nodded.

"I mean Admiral Tali, and Garrus Vakarian? I'm not worthy enough to be here. And we are going to be fighting side-by-side with a geth. I just don't even know what to think."

Clara shrugged. "I have one thought. Who is the Shadow Broker that they can get Aria T'Loak, Commander Shepard, Tali'Zorah, and Garrus Vakarian to help us on this mission?"

"I never thought about it, but now that you mention it…" Alleis pondered.

"I don't think it is the Commander. It seems like too much work immediately after fixing the galaxy. It probably isn't Wrex, or either of those two," Clara motioned to the happy couple. "It could be the AI that Shepard served with. It would certainly have the capabilities to handle the massive information networks that being the Broker would require. I doubt it is any of the Alliance personnel. I don't think they would have the skills to do it."

"What about that salarian that worked with Shepard? Or did he die?"

"Did he die indeed," Clara mused.

"There always is Liara," Alleis said.

"If you just saved the galaxy would you let your paramour return to the seedy underbelly of the galaxy's information trading as your day job?" Clara asked.

"Probably not," Alleis admitted.

Before they could continue to attempt to figure out who would be their mysterious employer, the pilot announced that they have arrived.

The cargo bay doors had barely opened and Mark had jumped out of and into the secret science base.

The rest of the squad followed more slowly. Aten and Doak were told by Baht to follow behind once they had cleared out the rooms.

Clara and Garrus equipped sniper rifles, Tali called up a combat drone, Alleis loaded her tech armor, and Baht readied his grenades.

The first room was filled with Controlled.

But Mark the geth was making short work of them. It had a turret that was mowing down Controlled troops like they were nothing.

And the platform itself was moving with lethal ferocity. With the exception of Clara, most of the squad had seen plenty of geth in action. Mark moved differently than the others.

Instead of going for pure efficiency: killing someone with exactly enough rounds and moving on to the next target with maximum accuracy and economy of movement; Mark the geth fought almost like an angry turian. It was still impossibly accurate, but some of its kills were brutal, and not very efficient. It killed with anger and wanted to make sure the Controlled that still lived knew fear. If it had been a krogan it would have entered its blood rage and charged the entire room.

The squad was brutal and efficient machine.

The first room held something close to forty indoctrinated troopers, but the seven of them fought for less than three minutes.

Mark didn't even pause before running into the next room to face the remaining sixty Controlled.

Clara was doing her best to show that her own combat prowess measured up with the legends beside her. But she noticed something strange. Tali was a capable fighter, but in terms of who could kill more in a short period of time Garrus should have taken the lead. Clara spied more than a few shots that Garrus intentionally passed up so that Tali's kill count would out rank his. But he didn't let her walk away with it. He was certainly nipping at her heals the whole way.

Kurana, however, was still charging and attacking with little to no regard for her own safety. She almost got killed by Clara at least twice. Before when it happened Clara managed to move, or Kurana managed to duck just in time. But now it was like they were out of synch with each other. And Kurana's barriers took hits from others when she, intentionally or not, walked into their line of fire.

When the room was empty Mark hacked through the final door in a matter of seconds to find Xen and the captured geth.

There were a few Controlled forces inside, but they were no match for the hardened veterans that walked through the door.

Xen was hovering over the captured geth. The quarian had performed amateur surgery on the geth. The chest cavity had been ripped open and Xen's hands were inside the geth's chest.

Mark rushed at Xen, but Clara got in the way.

"I know you don't want to hear this, but we need Xen alive. So she can tell us where the rest of these guys are so we can stop them from doing this again," Clara said.

The geth's flaps lowered from anger to remorse. Instead of attacking Xen it went over to the captured machine and took it off the operating table.

"Xen, working with the people that invaded our home world?" Tali yelled. "I'll have you up on treason charges."

"And no one will come to your defense," Garrus said. "Are we sure that I can't shoot her now?"

"We need to find out where the rest of the indoctrinated are going and doing," Clara said. "We need to interrogate Xen."

"Don't you understand? The geth aren't alive! We made them! They deserve to be returned to their rightful places in the galaxy, as our servants," Xen said. "I need to know what makes them tick. I will return them to their masters."

The extremist quarian continued to spout her rhetoric, but Clara wasn't paying attention.

Instead she had her eye on the angry turian, Kurana. She had that dead-set look in her indoctrinated eyes. She was sizing up Xen, like she was ready to pounce. Clara hadn't forgotten what Kurana did on Rannoch. Or on Omega.

Sure enough the cabal charged at Xen with the intent to kill her but Clara was ready. She swung the butt of her rifle at where she knew Kurana's head would be.

The impact was impressive. Kurana buckled and flew off her feet. She was out cold before she hit the ground.

"What was that?" Garrus asked.

Baht said nothing, he just walked up to Kurana's prone form and put his gun to her head.

"Baht, wait," Clara pleaded. "Let me bring her back to the ship. I don't think she was trying to do anything bad. I think she is just really passionate about killing all the indoctrinated enemies we have. Let me talk to her."

"If she does anything else fishy, you are going to be the one I'll make pull the trigger," he said. "Or maybe she'll kill you. Or maybe the Broker will decide you aren't worth the trouble and I can put you both down myself."

Clara stared down the four eyed batarian with her indoctrinated eyes.

"Come on Xen, I'm taking you back to Rannoch to face charges," Tali said.

Garrus escorted the disgraced quarian admiral back to the ship. Clara carried Kurana back to the ship. Baht told Doak to investigate this facility, and Aten went with Tali and Garrus to see what he could get out of Xen. Alleis stayed behind to try and help Mark and its companion who were speaking in that strange geth chatter.

The team split up when they returned to the ship.

Clara took Kurana down to her room in the cargo bay. She was waiting for the door to open when the turian's eyes snapped open.

The solid neon blue eyes of the turian locked on Clara's and one word was said, "Submit."

All Clara could feel after that was her mind being invaded by the source of the deep, metallic voice that tried to steal away her thoughts.

"Submit."


	13. Powerless

**Powerless**

The voice that sounded eerily like Harbinger, the first Reaper, penetrated the mind of Clara. From beneath the soul crushing voice of the Reaper, the human heard the whispered voice of the turian telling her to just give in.

Clara couldn't do anything to help herself.

There was only the voice, and the invasion of her mind.

It felt like some stabbed an icicle straight through her skull. The pain was so intense, that Clara was considering surrendering.

Alleis had taken the elevator down to the cargo bay to check on Clara and the unconscious Kurana.

When the elevator doors open she saw Kurana standing over the helpless human. Even from the great distance Alleis could see Kurana's blue eyes burning.

The asari started sprinting towards the pair. And she did the only thing she could: she cast a biotic throw in hopes that she could get the indoctrinated turian in the hold.

With a suddenly flash, Clara's field of vision cleared and everything was topsy-turvy. She couldn't tell which way was up. It was because both she and the turian were thrown into the holding cell.

Clara figured she should attempt to close the cell, but Kurana was already back up and preparing to charge at the running asari.

The cabal's charge smashed into the sentinel's tech armor with such a force that it burst. It knocked Kurana back, but it gave Alleis enough time to set up her annihilation field.

It gave her the edge over the turian in the close quarter combat that followed. The cabal tried to attack the asari with the poisoned gauntlets, but the asari kept the pressure on the turian.

Even though Alleis' hand-to-hand was considerable, the indoctrinated turian's was better. Kurana landed a few close cuts to the asari's exposed face. Alleis could feel the poison rushing into her blood stream. She knew that the fight needed to end one way or the other soon.

For a split second, Alleis got an opening and launched a throw at the turian. Combined with the annihilation field, the two powers exploded and forced the turian into a nearby wall.

But Kurana didn't pause. She immediately charged back at the tired and poisoned asari. This time the asari was ready and used a play she saw Clara use earlier.

When the turian cabal appeared before her, she was met with a prepared biotic punch that met the charge and resulted in a powerful explosion. The asari's closed fist connected with the turian's face and broke through the skin and bone.

Alleis had punched through Kurana's skull. The turian was certainly dead.

She pulled her fist and half of her forearm out of the turian's empty skull and said, "I'm sorry."

The wounded sentinel walked over to the chamber where Clara lay on the ground.

"Significantly more badass," Clara said with black humor.

It didn't make the poisoned asari feel any better. She just shut the room off from the outside world.

Her midnight blue skin was significantly paler now.

"You gonna be ok?" the pained Clara asked. Her head felt like it had been opened with a rusty cleaver.

Alleis sat down. "I think I'm just going to sit here for a bit. How are you?"

"Eh, I'm fine," Clara lied as the edges of her vision started to collapse into unconsciousness.

"Me too," Alleis said.

Before she passed out she managed to apply a dose of medi-gel to herself, and one to Clara.

"What the hell happened?" Baht yelled at them when the door opened.

He had already seen Kurana's dead body.

"She was indoctrinated," Alleis said. "Fully by the looks of it. She attacked me, and I killed her."

He put a gun to Clara's sore head. "Next time, I'm going to remember why I don't listen to humans and I'm just going to pull the trigger."

Alleis helped Clara stand up, "What's happening now?"

"We dropped off our esteemed guests on their home planet. Doak is staying at the base to look it over, see if we can't find out what they are after. Aten is going with the Admirals to see what he can get out of Xen. The geth wants to seek revenge on the Controlled and we are heading to Earth," Baht said before leaving. "Suit up."

It took them an hour or so to make it to the Sol System, enough time for Alleis to take another medi-gel to clear out the poison from her system. And for Clara to take enough medi-gel to clear up her massive headache.

"How are you feeling?" whispered Alleis to Clara, trying to make sure that the angry batarian didn't overhear.

"I'm good," Clara said. "I think. It feels like I've been hit by an orbital bombardment by the entire quarian fleet."

"What are we doing on Earth?" asked Alleis.

Baht said nothing, but the geth answered. "Not Earth. Earth's satellite. Classified Alliance storage base for disabled Reaper parts before complete destruction. Shepard-Commander ordered all Reaper technology thrown into a star for total destruction."

"What did the Controlled, the indoctrinated do here?" Clara asked.

"We just got this," Baht said angrily. But he always sounded angry. "Hopefully we can catch them in the act."

Clara attempted to shake her mind clear as the ship landed on the moon.

They all adorned their breather helmets, except for Mark.

The guards at the warehouse entrance were all dead, along with a few Controlled forces.

It didn't bode well. The warehouse was eerily quiet. No signs of life. Except for Clara, who swore she heard each of the dead pieces of Reaper whisper to her, like tiny gusts of wind in the massive structure. She tried to ignore it, but the warehouse was massive, designed to hold the giant pieces of defunct Reapers. The group decided to split up and search the warehouse.

Clara crept off towards the left, where she swore she could feel some indoctrinated forces.

Baht had doubled back from the way he was supposed to go so that he could follow Clara.

Sure enough she stumbled upon a whole squad, about twenty indoctrinated, loading Reaper parts onto a large transport shuttle.

"I found them," she whispered into her omni-tool.

Then using her stealth skills, she pulled an indoctrinated behind a crate and cut his throat with her omni-blade. She knew the others would feel his death, so without missing a beat she activated her tactical cloak, lined up a shot, and blew away a Controlled's head.

She loaded a new heat sink and managed to kill another indoctrinated before the others could react. Clara knew that she couldn't hold them off by herself, but her hope was that she could delay them until her reinforcements arrived. And maybe she could prevent them from taking off.

Baht had decided to remain out of sight and watch Clara. She was killing as many indoctrinated as she could. And she was doing her best to keep anyone from retreating to the shuttle.

Her tactical cloak was cooling down when she tried to take a shot a Controlled who was sprinting towards the shuttle. A round impacted against her shields and caused her shot to go wide, missing her intended target.

She activated her cloak and tried again, but it was too late. The pilot was out of range.

"They're taking off!" Clara yelled.

"Ship disabled, engines down!" called the salarian pilot over the coms. "Crippled!"

"Son of a bitch!" Clara yelled as she blew off another Controlled's head.

"Secondary Controlled force attacking ship, already disabled our engines," the pilot replied. "Will try to hold them off with turrets until help arrives."

Mark and Alleis showed up as the ship took off. Baht melted out of the shadows a second later. With the squad reunited they managed to kill off all but two of the Controlled.

But they both activated their ocular flash bangs that blew their own heads off before they could be questioned.

"Shit!" Clara swore. "Now what?"

"We get back to the ship," yelled Baht.

"Controlled here defeated," the salarian pilot said. "Will start emergency repairs immediately."

"Now we report for our orders," Baht said.

"For what? What leads do we have now? Unless you know something about these assholes that I don't," Clara argued.

"If I didn't think I needed you I would blow your head off," the batarian said. "Now back to the ship."

Back on the ship the engineer and the pilot had put aside their differences so they could fix the ship as fast as possible.

Baht led all four combatants to the QEC room for a debriefing from the Shadow Broker.

"We lost them sir," Baht said.

"I know. And if you ever pull anything like that again Baht, I will kill you myself."

"You told me to watch the indoctrinated ones," he said in his defense. This meeting took a turn that he was not expecting.

"Not at the cost of the mission. This could have been prevented if you did your job. If you ever do this again…" the Broker was a threatening figure.

"This what we know," the Broker said once it was clear that its threats were understood, "the indoctrinated forces have been kidnapping people on Omega, presumably other places as well but we shut down their operation on Omega. This was for the sole purpose of bolstering they're already limited numbers. How they are indoctrinating new people is something we haven't been able to figure out. Then they were apparently after fragments of Reaper Code with the geth on Rannoch. Xen told us there was little to no code left inside the programming of the geth that remain. And now we know that they've been stealing Reaper parts. My best guess is that they are rebuilding themselves a Reaper. I have every single agent looking into what they are doing. We know it isn't Leviathan, the Alliance has it blockaded. The Omega-4 Relay is dormant but we mined it shut so that anything less than three dreadnaughts would be obliterated if they attempt to pass through it. All the Cerberus facilities are under lock and key pending destruction. So if they are building a Reaper then they are going to need the Reaper Code. Keep looking for anything that can lead us to where they are or where they are going."

The Broker ended the conversation.

Baht left the room without a word.

It left Clara with the opportunity to talk with Mark the geth, "So why did you want to join with us?"

The geth was silent for a second. "You humans have a phrase: revenge is a dish best served cold. The geth have been called cold and emotionless. Who better to offer revenge than the geth?"

"This is all because the indoctrinated took your mate?" Clara asked.

"Yes."

"So what did you do on Rannoch for the last two years?"

"I assisted the Creators in their construction of their planetary defense systems. We are designing prototypes that we hope to share with the galaxy," Mark answered.

Clara had to ask her next question, "I hope I don't sound like an ass, but how to geth… reproduce?"

Mark's flaps twitched a bit as its processors tried to come up with an example.

"It is similar to the asari. We geth combine our code and we select the best parts of each unit to make a new, cohesive whole," Mark answered. "The geth are not like organics. We do not have sex or reproduce for any need."

"Then why did you decide to do it?" Alleis asked.

Again, Mark's flaps twitched while it tried to come up with a satisfactory answer.

"No data available."

Clara shrugged. "I guess that is geth speak for 'I don't know'."

"What happened to your companion?" Alleis asked.

"It is back on Rannoch with the other geth. They are attending to the platforms injuries."

"Will it recover?" Clara asked.

"The hardware damage was extensive," Mark said. The simulated voice sounded angry. The flaps were down in a kind of anger. "But the software was intact. Recovery should be swift."

"That's good," Alleis responded.

"I saw the way you fought on Rannoch's moon," Clara stated.

The geth hung its head in shame. "This unit could not bear the thought of losing its companion. Emotions are… difficult."

"I think I would have done the same thing," Alleis said. "It's hard seeing something bad happen to someone you love without being able to do something about it."

"Yes," Mark agreed. "This unit is going to message Rannoch."

The geth said as it left the CIC and went to find some place quiet. Its processors had much to mull over.

Silence fell over the remaining two. They both knew they should discuss what happened, but neither wanted to bring it up.

Finally Alleis broke the silence, "I'm sorry for what I did."

"How can you be sorry?" Clara responded.

"I killed your friend and I'm sorry for that. But she was going to kill you."

"Don't be sorry. You saved my life. And we weren't friends. We were warriors thrown together by circumstance and the only thing we had in common was that we fought for the wrong people at some point," Clara said.

"Then why do I feel so bad about it?" she asked.

"Is it because of my body count speech?"

"Maybe."

"If you didn't do what you did then the bad guy count would have gone up by two, instead of the body count by one," Clara reasoned.

"It still doesn't make me feel any better."

Clara gave a knowing shrug. "But it is my fault. You had to clean up my mess. I was trying so hard to prove that she could be saved, that _I_ could be saved. Instead of doing any good I put everyone else in harm's way and force you to kill Kurana to save my pathetic ass. If you want to blame anyone, blame me."

The human didn't leave time for a response. She just walked to the elevator and took it down to the cargo bay and her isolation chamber.

Clara had to walk by Kurana's dead body on the way down. It was another reminder of the failures of her life. Bad choices she's made that tended to get people killed.

Alleis followed the human a few minutes later. She also saw the dead turian. Alleis put down the bottle of Dead Reaper Gin and picked up the broken body. She carried it to the nearest airlock, placed inside the small room, closed the door, and ejected it out into space.

"Find peace in the embrace of the goddess," the asari said quietly.

As she turned back she couldn't help but let a tiny smile play across her lips as she realized that Clara would have approved of her improved one liner ability.

She picked up the bottle of gin as a tiny maintenance drone appeared to clean up the dried blood. One less task for her to do.

Alleis knocked on the sealed room. Clara's back was to her. The human's omni-tool flashed briefly and the door opened.

"I figured that since we've completed two missions I figured we ought to celebrate," Alleis said.

"I failed the last mission," Clara said. "And I lost us a team mate."

Alleis took a swig of the gin out of the bottle. She had forgotten to find glasses. "But we saved Mark and his… -its companion. They are going to make new life. That's worth a toast isn't it?"

Clara turned around. "I guess."

She took the bottle from the asari and drank from it. She could taste the faint taste of the blue woman's lips on the rim.

"Come on!" the upbeat Alleis said. "The geth are trying to make babies! Isn't that just the most adorable thing you've ever heard?"

"I just keep thinking of the geth as the things that invaded my home planet," Clara said.

Alleis' eyes narrowed. She slapped Clara. "That was for being depressing. You know that wasn't Mark's fault."

Clara just looked kind of stunned. She sat down on her mattress and took a swig of the bottle. "I'm sorry. I just… -I'm hanging on by a thread here. When I'm out there every breath is another challenge, each heartbeat is another chance for me to give in. My thoughts are against me, even in here. I don't know if I am myself any more. I don't know if I've been me since the war ended."

"Of course you're you," Alleis said as she grabbed the bottle from Clara and took a drink. She savored the taste of the rim for a second. The asari never had a mind for philosophical things like this.

"I don't think you get how indoctrination works," Clara said. "It is subtle. There is the voice in your head telling you to do something. And you can ignore it, you know it isn't yours. But slowly, very very slowly, it starts to change, to convert you. Then before you know the voice starts to sound more like your own, to the point where you can't tell if it really is you or not. The voice is persuasive, no matter how hard you resist, it starts to erode at your defenses from within. Eventually you change so much that don't even recognize yourself, you've become someone new without even realizing it. And that's when it happens: you lose control. Your thoughts are not your own. Your body is in someone else's hands and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it."

Alleis handed the bottle back to Clara who took a long drink from it before continuing. "Like if I were to meet myself when I was still Alliance would I, could I, even recognize myself? Or would I find someone so completely different, so completely at odds with what I once believed that I would go to war with myself?"

The asari could only offer an, "I don't know."

"You know what the kicker is? If you hadn't shown up when you did, I would have given in," Clara said.

"Then I'm glad I arrived when I did," Alleis responded after she took the bottle offered by Clara. "Maybe you'll just need me to stick around. Whenever you feel yourself going over the edge, I'll pull you back up."

"Sounds good, if you are up to it," the human said. "Sorry I'm so depressing."

"That's why I'm here to rescue you. I brought the gin and everything," Alleis said.

"Well, I hate to disappoint, but the gin is all gone," Clara said as she suddenly felt the bottle of alcohol hitting her system.

Alleis shook her head as the dunk started to settle on her, "That was quick. Has the room always been this spiny?"

"I don't think it is the room," Clara said. "I think it is the whole ship."

"Well shit," Alleis said. "I don't know if I can make it back to my room."

Clara stood up and announced, "Just stay here. It's quiet."

"It wouldn't be the first time I've slept on the floor," Alleis said. "Before I met you and I didn't even have a floor to sleep on."

"Wait… You were homeless?" Clara asked.

"Yup. This is like the lap of luxury," Alleis said.

"Well you are welcome to share my floor mattress," the drunk human said.

"Sounds nice," Alleis said as she flopped down so she lay on top of the bed.

Clara began, clumsily trying to get out of her combat armor.

Alleis watched her for a second and said, "What're you doing?"

"As much as I like my combat armor, it isn't really something I like to sleep in if I can help it," she explained.

Alleis looked down and was surprised to find her own armor was still on. "You make an excellent point."

The asari struggled to stand. When she did, she started divesting herself of her armor. Clara turned her back to Alleis to give her some sort of privacy.

"You know I was kind of hoping something like this would happen when I came down here," Alleis mumbled.

"Did you come down here with precious alcohol to try and get me naked and drunk?" Clara asked.

"Not specifically," Alleis said as she took off her chest piece. "I did want to talk about us. I mean if a geth could find love, what about us two?"

"That's a depressing thought," Clara said. "I'm being shown up by a robot."

"I like you Clara," Alleis told her as she took off the last of her armor and stood only in the simple white underclothes that most people wore under their combat armor. "You are strong, independent, trying to make the best of a horrible situation, and you care more than should be reasonably healthy. And behind your scars and your pain, you're quite pretty."

"I like you too," Clara said. "You are the nicest person I've met in a long time. You are so selfless and good and you are the kind of person I wanna be. And you are kind of adorably lame."

"Hey!"

"It was a compliment!" Clara tried to cover.

"Sure it was… So do you want to try this?" Alleis asked.

Clara nodded.

"I don't know what I'm doing though," the asari admitted.

"Me either," the human responded.

The asari kissed the human.

The first one was just the emotional and physical connections between two people. Each subsequent kiss was deeper than that. The asari's mind had reached out and touched the human's.

She could feel Clara's wounds, and self doubt. Each instance of emotional turmoil. Each scar under her fingers and each mountain of pain that went with it. Their souls touched and Alleis was almost overwhelmed for a second by the sheer amount of fear present within the human; and the small part of herself that she had locked away, the part that Alleis could hear whispering across the landscape of Clara's mind. But then she found the undercurrent of strength within her. The driving force, the survival instinct, and the indomitable will to fix what she had broken. For Alleis it was awe inspiring.

Clara could feel the asari, she could feel the emotional make up of Alleis. The pain of loss. The undercurrent of sadness. The self doubt that fueled the asari's bravado. Her heartache was plain to Clara. But it was all covered by Alleis' optimism and hope. Then Clara discovered the core of Alleis' being, the pure, unadulterated kindness that enveloped everything the asari is and was. The kindness that once led the asari down the path towards being a Justicar. The kindness that allowed Alleis to work with a geth without any kind of prejudices. The same kindness that gave complete and utter trust in the clearly indoctrinated human before. For Clara it was amazing and she didn't feel worthy to be loved by someone like the asari in her arms.

Each time the pair connected they felt the pain and hardship start to melt away. Alleis' was strengthened by Clara's will, and Clara was saved by Alleis' hope and kindness.

Their time together was short, as each only had enough emotional energy to last for a little under an hour. Both slept surprisingly well for the first time in a long time.


	14. Dossiers

_Author's Note: Just a short one today. Some background and more Shadow Brokery stuff._

**Dossiers**

Liara hadn't gotten much sleep lately. The last mission was a complete failure. She was starting to lose hope in the Shadow Broker operative, and was gaining hope in an indoctrinated sleeper agent. That thought didn't help. She had no idea where the Controlled forces were seemingly gone, and she strongly suspected they were building a Reaper somewhere.

And baby Synthia was keeping her parents up all night.

Liara had decided that she was naming her daughter after the Savior of the Galaxy. Regardless of what Shepard had to say about it.

But at least Tali and Miranda were able to get her some information.

She listened to Tali's information first.

"Liara," the message started, "sorry we're going to be late. Garrus didn't want to leave without me, and I've got this whole Xen thing to deal with. But I did what you asked. Your human agent, Clara I think? She seems to have taken up a kind of leadership role. There is that kind of… way she walks and talks, or doesn't talk as she seems like the quiet type, that reminds me of Shepard. That kind of fire that will get people to follow her into the mouth of hell. But she looks like she is under considerable stress. I don't know if she can take it. Then there is the turian. She worries me. She tried to kill two of our captives. Almost killed Xen before we could get any information out of her. The turian is dangerous. And as soon as I exile Xen, Garrus and I will head out. I've got to make sure everyone knows that crimes like this against the geth are crimes against the quarian people. Wish me luck."

Tali's message only confirmed with Liara suspected. The turian did turn out to be completely indoctrinated. But she suspects that it only happened after the events on Omega, which is equally concerning. The Controlled have a way of forcing indoctrination on people without any Reapers. Now she only has one indoctrinated on her side and she still doesn't know if it is a good thing or not.

The other message was from Miranda. It was a very formal looking message, probably copied straight from the Cerberus records with some commentary by the former operative.

"_Olivia Murray. Born Eden Prime. Tech and stealth training. High proficiency in sniper rifles. Failed N7 Shadow training. Could be of use for Phantom program, lack of biotics could make this difficult,"_ it read. Liara didn't know about the Shadow training. She just assumed that all N7 training was similar. Shepard doesn't like to talk about it. To Liara, it sounds like a sort of cult the way all N7 operatives don't talk about what happens there.

_"Lost on-again off-again boyfriend on the SSV Chicago when it went down. Loss of arm. Potential recruit for Lazarus Project. Get Alliance Brass to discharge her from duty. Wait it out for a week or two, let her hit bottom before offering her a new position."_

Liara scowled. She never liked Cerberus, but this was low, even for them. They were playing with the lives of wounded veterans to get recruits.

_"Murray responded well to our initial offers. Recovery of Shepard's body has been successful. Recommend Murray placed in Lazarus Cell."_

She was at least grateful that Clara had gotten something out of the deal, and she had helped Shepard out in some way or another. The following notes were from Miranda's personal files. Possibly more valuable than the Cerberus documents. Miranda always took detailed notes of just about everything so there was a lot to go through.

_"Operative Murray reported on time for the evaluation. Other than the recent alcohol binges she appears in excellent condition. She'd be a prime candidate for the prototype implants. If successful we can use them in the Commander. The damage to Shepard is catastrophic. We need to start testing ASAP. I've ordered Murray to detox immediately. She didn't question the order. Some hope remains."_

Liara choked back a sob when she remembered recovering the Commander's mostly dead body. She is still at a loss about how the Commander ever came back from that.

_"Operative Murray has reported for duty. She has taken herself off alcohol completely. She says she did it cold turkey, fearing any more drugs would disqualify her from the study. Impressive, if true. Blood work sent to lab for work up. The candidate is promising; she is of similar age and physique to Commander Shepard. They even have the same general fighting style. Murray is even an N7, failed but she made it through all of it except the final test. When pressed her response to why was simply that she doesn't test well."_

Liara looked over the medical notes from Miranda's tests. It looked like Clara didn't lie, and she did cold turkey off her drug of choice. The Shadow Broker jumped ahead a few pages to when Clara finally got her new arm.

_"The graphs have taken rather well. Healing at the operation site has been faster than expected. Almost a 25% increase. Suspect that injuries to the implant will heal twice as quick as other bodily injuries. The operative doesn't complain of any pain, unsure if it is military machismo or actual lack of pain._

_ Murray reports full use of motor controls and feeling in her arm. The implants have taken quite well. Operative Murray is eager to get to physical therapy, but I have concerns about the healing process. I want to make sure the implants aren't going to tear themselves out before we are ready for the physical tests."_

_ "Murray has been confined to bed rest for a day. She tore out some of her stitches trying to do push-ups while confined in her room. She managed almost two hundred before the stitches gave out. The implants preformed exceptionally well. Require further testing. Physical therapy will start tomorrow. Live combat training by the end of the week._

_ Murray is remarkably strong willed. She has done all of the physical therapy exercises twice while alone in her room, and then some things on top of it. The implants are performing much better than expected. She has been complaining of pain, but strongly suspect the pain is from her over exertion. Recommend implants start being tailored for Commander Shepard. Murray is seeing live fire tomorrow._

_ Live fire went better than expected. Murray has seen no loss in accuracy or strength. In fact we can assume marked improves over Alliance aptitude scores. Prototype considered successful. Murray ready for active duty."_

The report ends with a large series of tests and numbers proving Miranda's notes correct. Clara, formerly Olivia Murray, had accepted the implants exceptionally well and managed to do just as well as could hope. So that Commander Shepard could live.

Liara felt like she should thank her for that. But she hopes that the will that Miranda noted, and so did Tali, would keep her from getting fully indoctrinated. She saw what happened with Kurana, the turian. She needed one more indoctrinated to keep the mission alive.

And Baht was starting to become a liability.

The whole mission was crumbling around her.

And she wasn't about to drag either Synthia into it. She would need to solve this herself, one way or the other.


	15. Desert of the Real

_Author's Note: And now Clara has gone through the door of no return. No more sidequests for her. (Not like I'm very good at writing side quests anyways...)_

**The Desert of the Real**

Clara awoke. She was something that resembled happy. It wasn't something she had felt in a long time. She was calm. There was no desert that haunted her dreams. She was in the arms of a pretty asari.

For the few moments that it took her to wake and remember the world, she was content.

But then wakefulness was followed by memories, all of them reminded her who she was, what she did, and where she was. None of it made her feel any better.

She tried to crawl out of the bed without waking Alleis, but she wasn't successful.

"Morning," the asari said as she nestled herself into the human's back.

"Morning," Clara replied. "The one down side to this room is there no bathroom on this floor."

"Ah right," Alleis said. "Suddenly I am reminded where all that gin went."

Clara had gotten up and started to throw on whatever clothes she could find.

When the pair had gotten clothed Clara opened the door and immediately felt a dry wind blow across her.

"Shit," she murmured.

"What is it?" Alleis asked.

"Nothing," Clara responded.

Alleis wrapped her hands around Clara. "I was inside that mind of yours. I know you're lying."

"Remember when I was hallucinating sand?" the human asked after a long sigh.

"When Kurana was having the fits?"

"Yeah. Basically every night, except for nights in there or nights when I am super drunk, I dream of this desert. It calls to me. I wake up and I hallucinate sand. Now this dry, hot wind just blew by me. I can almost feel it, waiting for me," Clara explained.

"Is it the same desert every time?" Alleis asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Let's get cleaned up first, because afterwards I don't think you'll want to talk to me."

Alleis elected to have a long shower, but Clara was less interested. She suspected that the asari wanted her to voluntarily go to the desert. That was possibly the last thing she wanted to do. But they had no idea where else to go. And the only reason Clara was even brought along on the mission was for things like this, so she might as well try.

Clara waited for Alleis down by her chamber. When the asari arrived, still a bit wet from the shower, she sat down beside Clara.

"I think you should go to the desert and attempt to find out where it is," Alleis said.

"I figured. I just don't know if I can come back, and if I do go and come back I might end up like Kurana."

"I'll stay with you, I'll wake you up if anything terrible starts to happen," Alleis promised.

Clara was terrified, but she saw no other alternative. She could still hear the whispers. Would the whispers get louder, more undeniable if she went back? Just when she started to get away from it, she got pulled back in.

"Fine, but if you see me do anything weird, I want you to close this field down," Clara said.

"I'm not going to go anywhere," Alleis promised.

Clara sighed and sat down on her bed, Alleis sat across from her.

"Well I suppose if I have to go out now, last night was a good last hurrah," Clara said with a sad, tiny smile.

Alleis grabbed her hands, "I'm gonna bring you back, promise."

Clara took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled. Alleis' hands were comforting in her own. She felt them pull away.

"Alleis?" Clara asked.

But when she opened her eyes, the only thing she held was sand. The storm was still raging around her. The sand storms never seemed to stop on this planet.

She cautiously walked forward, and tried to ignore the whispers telling her to do so. She tried to tell herself that it was because she wanted, because she had to, not because some voice in the wind told her it was a good idea.

She had no idea how she was going to get out of this one. Her body was long gone, eroded away by the sand.

Steadily, she walked through the storm. She would not give in, not now. There were things to do. She needed to find this planet.

* * *

Out of the desert, Alleis held on to Clara's hands like her life depended on it. For all the asari knew, it did.

The human's eyes twitched behind closed eye lids, her hands grew warm and sweaty, and she was mumbling… something. Alleis couldn't make out what the human was saying. She just had to be hopeful that it wasn't a cry for help.

* * *

She walked through the storm of sand. It was unpleasant. The wind hadn't reached painful levels yet, but her skin still was rubbed raw by the flying sand.

Finally, the winds parted and she looked out at the valley expanse below her.

And for the first time ever a person was standing next to her.

"Welcome to Synalus," the purple asari said to her. The asari seemed to have several different voices. One the kind you'd expect from the lovely maiden, another a small child, and another was the deep voice of the Reapers. All the voices, layered with others (did she hear the slain turian comrade?), spoke, "We've been waiting a long time for you sister. See? We are almost done. But you have been proving most difficult to sway."

The asari's voice was like liquid. It poured into her mind and her soul. It was the most convincing voice she's ever heard. But she knew that she had to find a way out.

"What's this?" the asari asked. "You didn't come willingly? This was not your choice? Then why are you here?"

The mysterious asari's hands went to her head. Her grip was frozen steel, cold and absolute. She tried to get away from it, but her body refused to move.

"I see you brought your bitch with you," the asari said. "We'll soon fix that. And the Shadow Broker once things are finished here. And it will be soon."

* * *

Clara had started twitching even more. Alleis was getting concerned. Perhaps she should wake her now. She pushed a few buttons on her omni-tool, which involved taking her hands out of Clara's. But now she only had to push one button to close the shield.

Maybe she should just cut it off now.

Before she could make a decision, Clara's eyes snapped open. There was no trace of green left in her eyes.

Her hands were at Alleis' throat before she could react.

"The Reaper's will is absolute," Clara's lips said.

But inside her own mind Clara raged. She wanted out. This is not what was supposed to happen. This was her body, her mind and she controlled it.

Except not any more.

Alleis could feel the cold presence that had taken over Clara inside her mind, trying to kill her from the inside. It was the exact same feeling as the Ardat-Yakshi back on her home planet.

She tried to fight it, but she was powerless to stop it.

Clara was meanwhile fighting against an iron will in her own mind. She refused to become indoctrinated. She refused to kill the one person who had gotten close to her. She refused to be controlled.

Through sheer willpower, Clara regained some semblance of control. She used it to throw Alleis out of the room and break contact.

After that she was completely shut out of her own mind. She was cold, and alone.

Alleis landed outside the room and managed to get a finger on the button to close the shield. But Clara was still coming for her. She could practically see the internal struggle playing out in the jerky, unsteady walk of the once friendly human.

The shield closed before Clara could exit it, and the second it closed the human fell to the ground.

Alleis was breathing heavily, fearing she had doomed a friend, maybe something more than a friend, to indoctrinated hell. She dared not open the shield, but she desperately wanted to know Clara's fate.

Clara sat up uneasily and looked around. She was in her quiet chamber. The voices in her head were down to a low whisper instead of the shouts she experienced not minutes before.

She looked through the wall and saw Alleis looking at her with equal parts fear and relief.

"Sorry," she mouthed through the noise canceling wall.

"No, I'm sorry," the human said.

The asari finally stood up and walked to the door. She opened a communication channel. Alleis wanted to talk to Clara, but she feared opening the door.

"I'm so sorry," Clara said through the throbbing headache.

"It was my idea, so it is all my fault," Alleis responded.

"But it worked," Clara gave a pained smile.

"Really?"

"Synalus. And I'm pretty sure the villain is a purple asari. We need to move quickly, because she said they were almost done," Clara explained. "Go tell the Broker. I'm going to stay in here, where it's quiet."

Alleis ran to the QEC room and pushed the button to call the only number in the ship's logs.

The line was picked up by the same shadowy figure with the distorted voice.

"Yes? Oh, you're that asari that has taken to working with Clara. I don't think we've been introduced. I'm the Shadow Broker. You must be Alleis," the hidden figure said.

"Yes, yes. I'm sure you have a whole dossier about me and want to show how smart and important you are, but we have more important things," Alleis said.

The Broker let out an annoyed sigh. But really Liara was just happy that it wasn't expected because she didn't have time to go terribly in depth into the asari's background. More pressing matters had always presented themselves.

"What is it?"

"We have a location. Clara sacrificed herself to give us the name of a planet. Synalus. I've never heard of it, but that is where the indoctrinated are being called to," Alleis explained.

The Broker said nothing for a long moment. "Is Clara dead or otherwise indoctrinated?"

"No, but she tried to kill me before we could seal the chamber in the cargo hold. I'm going to insist that she sits out the next mission if you want her even remotely functional for anything after this."

"You're correct. Get going, report any findings to me. Go."

The Broker terminated the line as Alleis ran to talk to the pilot. He was bickering with the quarian engineer.

"Look, we've got a location to go to and we need to go now," Alleis said.

"We can do that."

A few minutes after the ship took off, Baht came storming down the elevator.

"What the hell are you doing to my ship?" he yelled at the asari.

"We have a location. The Broker told us to follow up on the lead immediately. And I figured it was better to get us underway rather than take the time to consult with you," Alleis fired back.

The batarian glared at the asari for a second.

"How long until we get there?" he asked.

The salarian pilot turned around and said, "Two hours."

Baht turned around and left without another word.

"I'll just go find Mark then," Alleis said.

"The geth is somewhere around the engine room. It is all my quarian counterpart complains about now," the pilot said.

"Thank you."

Down in the engine room Alleis found Mark silently watching the quarian playing around in the ship's engines.

"We've found the indoctrinated home planet. We are headed there now. If you want to join us, another warrior would be helpful," Alleis informed it.

The geth nodded and responded in its synthesized voice, "Thank you. I will be glad to serve with you. Will Broker Agent Clara be joining us?"

"I doubt it. She's not feeling well," Alleis lied.

The geth just accepted the falsehood with a nod of its head. "I will be ready when we land."

"Finally, some time away from the watchful, judging flashlight," the quarian complained.

"Not judging, merely observing," Mark responded.

"Ugh," the quarian complained.

But Alleis was already gone. She wanted to check on Clara. The asari knocked on the glass of the noiseless room.

"Can I come in?" she asked through the communication channel Clara opened.

The human shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I'm afraid that even a few second will be enough to lose control and kill you. I don't want to hurt you, ever again. I think it would be better if I stayed in here. Alone," Clara said.

Alleis knew that would be what she would say, but it didn't hurt any less. She knew from the way Clara's eyes had completely lost all their green to the strange, iridescent blue that there was no hope of her coming out of the room any time soon.

"I figured, I just hoped that I could come in and waste a couple of hours with you," Alleis said as she put her hand up to the glass.

Clara put hers up on the other side. "I'm sorry. I just… I really liked last night. I really like you, and I want to come out with that intact. I'm afraid of what is going to happen if I even give myself one inch of leeway."

"Would you mind if I just sat out here and waited with you?"

"Not at all."

"Do you want to know what the Broker said?"

"Sure."

* * *

Two hours later the ship landed on the desert planet Synalus. Mark and Alleis were waiting in the cargo hold for Baht. He finally descended and joined them.

"Is the indoctrinated bitch coming?" he asked.

Alleis had to restrain herself, "No."

"Fine, let's go."

The door opened and a desert world greeted them. As the three disembarked the wind started to pick up.

"Sand storm is brewing," Baht said unhelpfully.

"Visibility will be limited. For us and the Controlled forces," Mark responded slightly more helpfully.

Only Alleis remained silent. She loaded her tech armor and a couple of tech mines. She had a terrible feeling about this planet. Deserts are barren for a reason. And this was the storm that Clara had been dreaming about for two years.

She didn't like it.

* * *

Inside her quiet room, Clara was pacing. She had put on her combat armor out of need to do something. It was only after that she realized it was a bad idea since it made her itchy for combat.

But then she felt something.

Even through the sealed walls of her chamber she could feel the indoctrinated forces on this planet. There must have been hundreds of them. And she could feel each and every one of them.

A huge buffet of wind hit the ship, and caused it to tilt far enough that Clara almost lost her balance.

She knew it was the sand storm. It was the one from her dreams. And Alleis was out there.

Clara lowered the shields and exited her room.

No whispers greeted her. So she grabbed her gun, ran out the door and into the raging sand storm.

* * *

Clara couldn't see a thing, but she knew that she was moving towards a Controlled force. She had hoped to sneak up on them in the desert storm, but the Cerberus Phantom in the weather beaten and faded armor saw her approach.

The phantom swung its sword at Clara. She used her sniper rifle to block the swing, but the rifle proved only marginally effective. The sword cut through the metal, but got briefly jammed in the scope.

Clara's only option was to try and use her omni-blade.

The hard light computer caught the mono-filament blade. She narrowly escaped death with that. But the omni-blade could only do so much.

While the phantom tried to push its sword through Clara's hand and omni-tool she let lose an overload in the enemy's face.

The phantom's barriers remained intact, but damaged. However, Clara had an advantage while the phantom was temporarily blinded. She pushed the sword out of her enemy's hands and into her own.

With her right hand, she swung the mono-filament blade up and caught the phantom under the arm and got it in the heart. While Clara's omni-blade went straight through the phantom's skull.

While that one enemy was dead, Clara still felt almost a hundred indoctrinated hiding in the storm. And any number of them could easily kill off Alleis and Mark. She couldn't care less what happened to the batarian.

Her sniper rifle was in pieces. Her only option was to take the sword and work against the Controlled forces.

There had to be at least a hundred. And the storm was blinding, but she could still feel them out there… in the sands.

Clara took a deep breath, and breathed in the sand.

She activated her tactical cloak and went to work.

* * *

Alleis couldn't see anything in the storm. She could hear the sounds of gunfire in the middle of the storm, but she couldn't see who was fighting who. She could barely even see the two people she brought with her and they were only within a meter of her.

Something was out in the storm killing people, and her wild imagination went into overdrive.

They were going to get eaten by a thresher. She knew it.

* * *

Clara had stealthily taken out almost thirty of the Controlled when the storm started to die off.

She activated her cloak once more, and managed to get her blade in the chest of another indoctrinated before the storm died completely.

With the whirling sands gone, Clara could see again, but she could also be seen. All she had was her cloak, a handful of tech mines, her new sword, and a pistol. It would have to do.

Over a dune to her left, she heard the sounds of frenzied gunfire. Fearing that Alleis was coming under heavy fire, for Clara still felt almost fifty indoctrinated.

She ran as fast as she could over the sands. When she got there, she saw that Baht, Alleis, and Mark has been ambushed by twelve or so Controlled forces, but they fell easily once the sands had died down.

Clara sighed with relief to see them all, except Baht, alive and unharmed. But a small burst of assault rifle fire hit Clara square in the shields. She instantly activated her cloak and hit the deck.

"It's me!" she yelled.

"Put the gun down Baht," yelled Alleis.

Clara carefully decloaked and threw her hands in the air. She walked down the rest of the way and Baht lowered his assault rifle slowly.

"How are you guys?" she asked.

"We're fine. We were ambushed as the storm died, but other than that we are good," Alleis said. "Was that you out in the storm?"

Clara nodded. "I could feel a hundred or so indoctrinated out here."

"There's no way you killed a hundred," Baht said.

"No. There is still a massive amount of them over that way," Clara pointed. She was almost positive that it led towards the valley she dreamed about.

The valley did lie before them. The high walls of the desert canyon rose on either side of the squad. The valley was barely big enough to land their ship in.

At the far end of it, perhaps two hundred yards, stood a lone figure. The entire valley was empty apart from that figure.

"I thought you said there would be more," Bath said.

"I thought there would be. This guy is lit up like a goddamn sun. He feels like fifty indoctrinated, concentrated into one guy," Clara explained.

Before anyone could react the figure moved and a series of red explosions started cascading towards them.

"Shockwave!" yelled Alleis. "Get out of here!"

All four warriors tried to run in different directions. But the shockwave was so large that it got all four of them.

It felt like Clara was hit with a truck. She'd never been hit with biotics that have felt that cold. And they were red, she'd never seen that before.

Red like the Reaper's attacks.

The figure moved and started to rush at the downed warriors.

Baht, was the first one to pick himself up off the ground. He managed to unload an entire assault rifle clip into the charging figure, but it did nothing. The Controlled's shields didn't even falter for a second.

As the figure got closer Clara could clearly make out the fact that the man, or being, was covered completely in repurposed Reaper armor tech. Roughly six and a half feet tall, the New Reaper was the dark black of the genocidal machines. Pieces of Reaper armor had been cut and welded together to form a kind of medieval looking armor. It greatly amplified the user's biotic abilities, and gave it the fearsome visage of the once dead enemy of the galaxy.

She knew that they would need something akin to a heavy cruiser sustained strike to crack this thing's shields.

But the stubborn batarian loaded a new heat sink and continued firing.

The new Reaper just kept running towards him. When it got close enough it unleashed another red biotic field. A warp field hit Baht square in the chest. It started to rip him apart molecule by molecule. He screamed for a second and died.

Clara picked herself up off the ground and the Reaper turned to face her. The others were up now too. She hoped there was a person underneath the Reaper armor, and a person could be killed. It was just a matter of getting to it.

"Overload," Clara yelled. Three separate omni-tools tried to overload the Reaper's considerable shields. Mark threw out a small turret that started pelting the Reaper with bullets, but it didn't seem to notice.

Alleis and the geth started shooting while Clara tried to keep its attention.

The Reaper moved faster than it should have. Another red biotic field was launched at Clara that she knew that she had no chance of surviving, so she ducked underneath it.

Her omni-tool beeped the overload tech mine was ready. She immediately threw it, as did Mark and Alleis a second later.

Still nothing.

The Reaper swung a massive metal arm at her, but she moved out of the way.

With all of her strength, Clara tired to cut through the Reaper's arm. But the blade barely entered the evil metal covering.

The Reaper looked at Clara's pathetic attempt and threw from its body. She managed to hold on to her sword.

The throw was like hitting a solid concrete wall. Clara was picking herself up off the ground while Alleis and Mark threw more overload tech at the New Reaper.

Its attention was diverted off of Clara for a second as the Reaper threw Mark hard, causing massive damage to the geth's legs.

Clara stood up and threw another overload at the Reaper. And that was when they heard it.

The subtle _tink-tink_ of the bullets impacting on the Reaper's metal armor instead of diverting off the shields.

The Reaper's back was to Clara who took the opportunity to run up behind it and plunge her sword into its neck, between the tiny gaps in the Reaper armor, with all of her strength. She put her weight behind it and managed to get the blade to go all the way through. But because she put so much strength into it, she couldn't move it. She would either need to let go of the blade or hold on and be an easy target for the Reaper.

"Alleis! Throw me!" Clara yelled.

The asari was confused. "What?!"

"Do it!"

Alleis' only option was to listen to the human. She managed to hit Clara with the biggest biotic throw she could muster.

Luckily the last second plan worked. The force threw Clara, with her sword still in hand, backwards and off of the Reaper. Since the sword was inside the Reaper flesh, the sword managed to cut the rest of the way through thanks to the mass effect field.

Clara had taken off the Reaper's head.

The headless body of the New Reaper fell to the ground. Limp, useless, and dead.

Alleis ran over to pick Clara up off the desert floor.

"Are you ok?" she asked.

"Ugh, yeah," Clara moaned. "Let's not do that again."

"I'll call the ship for pick up," Alleis said, as Clara limped over to check on Mark.

"How are you?" she asked the machine.

"Damaged. I can still function as a combat unit, but I will need drastic emergency repairs to this platform's legs," Mark explained. "But still eager to finish this."

"Ship's on the way," Alleis explained.

When everyone was loaded on the ship, Clara applied some medi-gel to her everywhere, and Alleis took the geth to the engineer to see if they could patch it up.

Clara limped up to the QEC and called the Broker.

"How did it go?" the Broker asked.

"We know what they are doing," Clara said. "Baht's dead, the geth is injured, and the indoctrinated forces are building man sized Reapers. They don't quite have the power to take out an entire cruiser in a single go, but they still hit like a truck."

"Shit," the Broker swore for the first time. "What do you think?"

"The guy we killed was definitely not the Controller or the leader or whatever. And it didn't seem like it was ready. I think they are missing something important. Something they needed from the geth but couldn't get. And I think the entirety of the indoctrinated forces are heading there as we speak. I just don't know where it is."

"This is bad news," the Shadow Broker said.

On the other end of the line, out of range of the communicator Shepard looked at Liara and said so quietly that the woman on the other end of the line couldn't hear, "You know where they are going."

"Shit," the Broker swore. "They are heading to the Citadel. It just returned to the Widow nebula. You need to get there and stop them before they get to the Crucible."

"What's there?"

"The last of the Reapers."


	16. Citadel Control

_Author's Note: I seem to be having some trouble with the upload of this chapter. Second time's the charm?_

**Citadel Control**

"You've got to be shitting me," Clara said.

"It isn't a real Reaper, it is just kind of their essence. Pure Reaper Code. The indoctrinated probably need it to complete whatever new Reaper they've built."

"So what is the play?"

"Get there as fast as you can. Anyone on that ship that doesn't fight I will flay them alive with my mind. I'm going to be send _every_ Broker agent, and I'll call in every favor that I've ever been owed. But you need to be there now. Stop this before it gets even worse," the Broker ordered before hanging up.

Clara cleared her throat and yelled, "Set course for the Citadel, and get us there yesterday!"

It was the voice of a seasoned commander, and someone about to go to war.

* * *

"Liara I know you don't want me to, but I have to go," the Savior of the Galaxy said.

"But what about our daughter? You are going to leave us?" Liara cried. She knew that Shepard was right, but this wasn't a logical thing, it was emotional.

"I promised I'm always coming back. And I also promised that this galaxy was going to be peaceful and boring. Besides, the Reapers are trying to come back in some form or another. That sounds like a job for the Reaper Killer," Shepard said.

"I know, I know. I just don't want you to go," Liara said.

Shepard kissed her. "I'll be back before the baby needs a nap."

Mark's patch work gave him limited mobility. But as the geth stressed, more guns were better than less. It was going to have to do.

By the time they got to the Citadel several other Broker ships had already appeared.

The pilot dropped off the crew as close to the Presidium as possible. The Broker provided a detailed map on how to get to Citadel control, where the Citadel met with the Crucible. It truly seemed like there was nothing the Shadow Broker didn't know.

The fighting was already intense. Clara had never been to the Presidium, but it didn't matter. She was an ex-Marine, not a tourist.

Mark was busy picking off distant targets with its sniper rifle. Its limited mobility forced it to go for accurate shots and hope that Clara and Alleis could keep the closer targets down. Their shields were taking a beating. Particularly Alleis whose bright tech armor seemed to be a favored target of the Controlled.

Clara did her best to take the shooting away from her small squad. She could tell who was targeting Alleis, a feeling that she exploited but hated. Her new sword proved impeccably useful as she backstabbed and cut through armor without needing to deal with the pesky kinetic barriers first.

The field of battle was a mess. There were hundreds of indoctrinated all over the Citadel and more and more Broker agents were appearing every minute. Clara pushed her squad as fast as she could through the chaos of the Citadel, while trying to maintain some safety by making sure no one charged forward with a down shield. And Mark's patchwork legs made his forward movement slow, and Clara wasn't willing to leave someone so useful behind.

For a split second Clara swore she saw, and heard, the king of the krogan, Urdnot Wrex, killing indoctrinated.

But the farther they got the more intense the fighting got. The Presidum was filled with Broker Agents fighting, and killing Controlled forces. It seemed like the Broker was owed many favors since more Agents kept arriving by the second and it seemed like every important race was involved. Krogan, humans, asari, turians, an entire salarain STG group, more than a couple of platoons made up of both quarians and geth, and what looked like to Clara as a Spectre team absolutely obliterating the Controlled forces.

Just as they were about to enter the secret chamber in the Citadel that would take them to the Crucible they met up with a Broker team that was pinned down, only one survived by the time they got there. Clara, Alleis, and Mark had managed to save her from being flanked, but the sheer number of indoctrinated had all but stopped forward progress down the narrow hallway.

Mark managed to throw a turret behind their lines to wreck havoc.

Clara and Mark began sniping anything that moved, along with a particularly talent Broker agent with a Black Widow sniper rifle. Clara was jealous for all of a second before she figured they had better things to do.

When they had thinned the Controlled forces enough, Clara and Alleis headed down the hallway while the Broker agent and Mark provided sniper cover.

Clara activated her cloak, Alleis prepared to detonate her annihilation field, and Mark and the Broker agent fired overload and sabotage tech.

Alleis then burst in and took out a few with the biotic explosion. Clara snuck in and managed to get four indoctrinated with the same sword stroke. The Broker agent ran down the hallway and managed to kill her fair share of indoctrinated, and slow, broken Mark brought up the rear.

Once the indoctrinated were finished, Clara looked up at the inside of the Crucible and said to Alleis, "That's it, that's where we got to go."

Mark told the warriors, "I should stay here. Defend your flank."

"A good idea," Clara said. "You want to provide him some support?"

The Broker agent shrugged.

"Come on," Clara said to Alleis.

They stepped on the small platform and ascended into the Crucible.

The reactor in front of them was massive.

Alleis saw a lone figure standing there.

Clara saw the figure from her dream and a small child.


	17. Control Lost

_A|N: A short one today, but I'll put up the next one tonight._

**Control Lost**

"We have visitors," the child with the creepy childlike, and Reaper voice said.

The other figure turned to face the pair. The purple asari that attacked Clara before snarled with rage and hit Alleis with a red biotic field. She got hit with the throw and fell back down way Clara and her just ascended.

"You son of a bitch," Clara cried. She tried to shoot at either the New Reaper or the child.

The bullets just deflected off the Reaper and passed through the child.

"You cannot win here human," the child replied.

"What are you even doing?" Clara asked. "Rebuilding the Reapers?"

"In a sense," the child said. "This whole thing was a contingency plan in case we were ever defeated. One that we never planned to use, but we never expected this outcome would ever come about either."

"To what end? Just because you are dicks?" Clara asked. If she was going to die here she figured it might as well be an informed death.

"We were creating the perfect life form. And now millions of years of research was destroyed because of one arrogant human," the child spat. "But not all of our data was loss. Some of the Reaper secrets still existed out there. I have just been attempting to collect them. The end result is this. An Ardat-Yakshi. A genetically powerful asari, with almost Reaper like indoctrination capabilities, and the one thing we have never been able to harness effectively: biotics."

Clara looked over the asari covered in Reaper tech. She was awkwardly still, hardly breathing, not saying anything. She wore no head gear. And the imposing figure radiated power.

"Still imperfect, but it will have to do for now. Until I can rebuild it all," the child said.

"And what are you exactly?"

"I am the last of the Reapers. I am the Reaper's consciousness. I am the Reapers," the creepy child answered.

"And you live here? Are you in the station?"

"I am the station."

"Well that is going to make it slightly more difficult to kill you," Clara mused.

"I grow tired of this," the star child said. "Turn her."

The asari hit Clara with a biotic field before she had any time to react. She was frozen in stasis.

The Ardat-Yakshi walked up to Clara and put a single metal encased hand on her cheek.

The New Reaper invaded her mind with ease and Clara felt the Reaper taking control of her mind. She could feel her thoughts turn into standard indoctrinated fare. The Reapers were right after all.

And she was absolutely powerless to do anything about it.

Until the sniper round broke through the stasis and ripped through her heart.

"You!"


	18. Reaper Killer

**Reaper Killer**

A person decloaked at the far end of the platform. The Broker agent walked forward slowly. And as it walked the armor changed from the standard Broker colors to the solid black with a red stripe of the N7 operatives.

The agent took off her helmet and the red haired Reaper Killer faced down the star child and the last Reaper.

"Me."

"You should be dead," the star child cried.

"And so should all of the geth, the Citadel, all of the relays, and almost everything we hold dear. I guess you are just a bad liar," Commander Shepard said.

Alleis followed up the commander and ran to the severely wounded Clara. Even though the fall had broken both of her wrists and part of her leg, she still tried to apply all of her medi-gel to her downed lover.

"How did you survive?" the child asked enraged.

"The same way you did? Refusal to die," Shepard shrugged. "I do have to ask one thing though, why did you lie to me?"

"It was necessary."

"Did you try to make the destruction of the Reapers sound like such an awful choice that I would never make it? Because you didn't want to lose your precious killing machines? What would have happened if I had picked the other options? Would I have made the Reapers stronger? Were they both lies? Is there no option to select all Reapers for complete destruction?"

The child said nothing.

"I guess I must have at least gotten a part of it right," Shepard said.

"I will just start over. The universe created the Reapers to be the perfect life forms. We will be that once again."

"That's where you are so wrong. Because the universe made me with the sole purpose of killing you. You are not the end of all life. But I am the end of you. I'm Commander Shepard, and this is where I kill the Reapers for good."

"Fine. We shall settle this for good Shepard," the child said finally dropping any semblance of child like voice.

The hologram walked up to the waiting New Reaper and they merged together.

"We are complete," the Reaper said complete with creepy, metallic Reaper voice.

"Now die," Shepard interrupted the Reaper's speech.

She fired an incarnation tech at the Reaper and hit it square in the chest. The uncovered Reaper's head was temporarily blinded. So Shepard got in close and punched the Reaper in the face.

Then Shepard forced her hands under the Reaper's armor and started to pry off the indestructible metal.

"I'm going to rip your heart out," Shepard menaced.

The New Reaper managed to push Shepard off of it, but not before the Reaper Killer managed to rip open the Reaper's chest.

The commander hit the ground near Clara's feet. The humans looked at each other.

"Mind if I borrow this?" Shepard asked.

Clara only had enough strength to shake her head.

Commander took the sword and advanced on the Reaper.

"Die!" the Reaper yelled as it threw a red biotic warp at the commander.

Shepard merely swatted it away. "Your people tried that one before. It didn't work then either. You're going to have to do better than that you kill me you miserable piece of shit."

The Reaper tried to do it again, but Shepard let it hit her. It did nothing to the savior of the galaxy.

"You can't kill me. You've had your turn," Shepard told the Reaper. "You get one and you used it. My turn."

The Reaper tried to hit Shepard but she dodged the blow and plunged the sword through the Reaper's exposed heart. She then used the sword to cut around the Reaper's chest in a circle around the New Reaper's Heart.

"You cannot defeat us Shepard," the Reaper said.

"Again. You forgot the again," Shepard said. She twisted the blade and pulled it out. With her free hand she punched into the wound she had carved into the living Reaper and pulled out its still living heart. "This is the second Reaper heart I've ripped out."

Then she swung the sword and cut off the asari's head.

"That's how you be a badass," Clara told the wounded Alleis.


	19. Control Regained

**Control Regained**

"Is that it?" Alleis asked. She missed the entirety of the star child.

"That's it," Shepard said. "Here's your sword back."

"I can't hear the voices anymore," Clara moaned as Alleis applied another pack of medi-gel to her human lover.

"Your eyes look much better," Shepard remarked. Clara's eyes dimmed and all semblance of the blue indoctrination were gone.

"You're eyes really are the most perfect green," Alleis said with a kiss. "But are the Reapers finally gone for good?"

"Probably not," Shepard shrugged. "That bastard child will probably be back sooner or later. At least it will try. But I'm going to use my influence to throw this station into a sun. I'm having a Reaper free Citadel built. But we need this one so we can use it as a template."

"Is anyone even going to know about this?" Alleis asked.

"Need-to-know basis."

"Why trust us?" Clara asked.

"Because of all the work you've been doing for my Shadow Broker. And you are now the sole member of list of people I've shot who are still alive. Congrats."

"Your Shadow Broker?" Alleis asked.

Shepard smiled and tapped her nose. "Don't tell anyone. Do you guys need anything?"

"Some surgery?" Clara asked.

"Ha, I like you," Shepard laughed. "I think your combat skills have more than qualified you to get your N7. It's yours. And you can come back to the Alliance if you want. I am a seven star Admiral now. But everyone just calls me commander still…"

"Seven star?" Alleis asked.

"One for each time I saved the galaxy, but minus one for working with Cerberus," Shepard shrugged. "Or you can keep doing clandestine work for the Shadow Broker."

"I don't even know," Clara said. Her wound had closed, and she wasn't in any danger of immediate death quite yet.

"Well I got to get back to the wife and daughter. She'll be pissed at me," Shepard said. "If you want to be a Broker agent come to these coordinates. We have a ship all set up in that system for now."

"I'll think about it," Clara promised.

"We'd love to have you aboard the Normandy," Shepard said. "I should go."

_Author's Note: And that's it. That's the end. I hope people enjoyed this. I kind of have a few ideas floating around about a couple of the loose ends left from the games proper that might get turned into sequels. But I have a novel to publish so maybe later. Thanks for reading._

"Is that it?" Alleis asked. She missed the entirety of the star child.

"That's it," Shepard said. "Here's your sword back."

"I can't hear the voices anymore," Clara moaned as Alleis applied another pack of medi-gel to her human lover.

"Your eyes look much better," Shepard remarked. Clara's eyes dimmed and all semblance of the blue indoctrination were gone.

"You're eyes really are the most perfect green," Alleis said with a kiss. "But are the Reapers finally gone for good?"

"Probably not," Shepard shrugged. "That bastard child will probably be back sooner or later. At least it will try. But I'm going to use my influence to throw this station into a sun. I'm having a Reaper free Citadel built. But we need this one so we can use it as a template."

"Is anyone even going to know about this?" Alleis asked.

"Need-to-know basis."

"Why trust us?" Clara asked.

"Because of all the work you've been doing for my Shadow Broker. And you are now the sole member of list of people I've shot who are still alive. Congrats."

"Your Shadow Broker?" Alleis asked.

Shepard smiled and tapped her nose. "Don't tell anyone. Do you guys need anything?"

"Some surgery?" Clara asked.

"Ha, I like you," Shepard laughed. "I think your combat skills have more than qualified you to get your N7. It's yours. And you can come back to the Alliance if you want. I am a seven star Admiral now. But everyone just calls me commander still…"

"Seven star?" Alleis asked.

"One for each time I saved the galaxy, but minus one for working with Cerberus," Shepard shrugged. "Or you can keep doing clandestine work for the Shadow Broker."

"I don't even know," Clara said. Her wound had closed, and she wasn't in any danger of immediate death quite yet.

"Well I got to get back to the wife and daughter. She'll be pissed at me," Shepard said. "If you want to be a Broker agent come to these coordinates. We have a ship all set up in that system for now."

"I'll think about it," Clara promised.

"We'd love to have you aboard the Normandy," Shepard said. "I should go."


End file.
